Silence (2009-2015)
“Silence is a dialogue between images, one found within nature, the other left to be consumed by it. These images reflect more a state of mind caught in an internal dialogue between the past and the present. Meditatively somber, they fuse together to form a photographic mantra that traces Torres Ruiz´s course in her development as an artist and an architect. It´s the blending between these two disciplines that lends her an aura all her own”.
Timothy Persons
Speech on the exhibition opening at Tempelhof Museum, Berlin, by Dr.Sabine Ziegenrücker, September 2018.
Gabriela Torres Ruiz: the genius of non-places. Le Littéraire, 11 November 2017
Photographer and architect Gabriela Torres Ruiz photographs "silence as that which was / before ever / by the torn murmur" (Beckett) within the places that engender it. Light, colour and space are at play in landscapes of alpine forests and Iceland, and in ruined interiors presented in diptychs and triptychs.
The viewer enters the gap of silence that the image never fills, but rather underlines. What remains is a chaos of possible forms, none of which stand out in a perpetual shimmer of traces as obvious as they are indescribable, at the heart of the passage of time. It becomes a swelling river.
Hence the drift: it's not just a thought that leads to silence, but the flow of each photograph. She makes it speak through persistent flow, for the insistent dispersal of all that remains, up to that limit where only magma remains. Each depiction takes on the value of mystery. Absence becomes the best of goods.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Time for a retreat. Der Standard, 30 Dec 2017
At the turn of the year, on the one hand, it is customary to review the old year as loudly as possible (in every respect) and (in the case of a positive balance) to say goodbye to it accordingly in style or to drown it with excessively consumed alcohol; on the other hand, the calendar caesura offers to go into oneself and to recapitulate contemplatively the past and to question the future. Helpful in the sense of contemplation is the new opus by Gabriela Torres Ruiz. Born in Mexico City in 1970, she calls her series about disappearance Silence. The photographer, who grew up in Montreal and Mexico, studied architecture in Krakow and Berlin before turning to imaging. Man-made, imagined and walled spaces in combination, context and confrontation with landscapes are then the subject of her photographic work. Less as a chronicler than as a sensitive observer of being between times. She pays special attention in her ephemeral, ethereal, almost spherical images to the process of decay, of slow disappearance. The character and atmosphere of historic buildings naturally reflect the fate of the people who once inhabited and lived in them. A search for the soul of things.
Gregor Auenhammer
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