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WASHINGTON POST
Dynamic Duos At G Fine Art
By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, July 8, 2005; Page WE33

[excerpt]
DUALITY, SQUARED, is on display at G Fine Art, where not just twos, but two different kinds of twos are put into play by artists Jose Ruiz and Beat Streuli.

Ruiz, a New York artist with ties to the District (from having recently lived here and from his ongoing membership in the Washington-based art collective Decatur Blue), is interested in many flavors of polarity: presence and absence, male and female, linkage and separation, pictures and text (or, for that matter, text and subtext), making and unmaking, haves and have-nots, and culture and subculture. The centerpiece of his exhibition, called "Underwriting," is a two-channel video, "Ghost Writing and Minimalist Graffiti." On one side, an all-black-clad tagger (Washington artist Kelly Towles) spray paints a black design, incorporating his signature, on a white wall. It takes all of 70 seconds, and he's out of there. On the other side, an all-white-clad figure (Ruiz himself) goes over the same drawing Towles has just made with a can of white spray paint, painstakingly obliterating the art that has just been made with stroke after stroke of whitewash until all that is left is a shadowy "ghost" of the original mark.

The whole eradication procedure takes about five minutes, during which time Mr. Clean's on-screen neighbor has made and remade the same drawing several times over.

The riff, of course, on Robert Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing," is obvious. Ruiz, however, takes that conceptual artwork -- which questioned the notion of authorship and the preeminence of the maker -- one step further, seeing as it is Towles's drawing, and not Ruiz's erasure, that seems to win out here, even in its undrawn state.

Other photographic works in the small show depict similar push-me/pull-you dynamics. A ski-masked man in a pinstriped suit reads the New York Times Arts and Business sections, from which all the pictures have been excised. A man and a woman's hands, locked in what used to be called Chinese handcuffs, are seen from two sides, with and without wedding bands, and variously tattooed with the words "I did" and "Did I."

Unlike Ruiz's "Ghost Writing," however, there is a kind of palindromic equilibrium to these works, a balance of yin and yang -- businessman and terrorist, art and money, marriage and divorce -- that creates tension without release. For every action, the artist seems to be saying with these pieces, there is an equal and opposite reaction; for every interpretation, a perfectly valid reinterpretation. It creates a kind of perpetual stasis from which there is no exit.