: SELECTED PRESS / ESSAYS

DECATUR BLUE
Distance (exhibition essay)
By J.W. Mahoney
January 2002

[excerpt]
Washington, D.C. has been and still is, weirdly enough, a city which draws metaphysical artists continuously into its social and aesthetic whorls. The current, sharpest edge of this spiral presents an active curiosity among artists about the kinds of inner space that exist. Inner distances are often, if not infinite, then infinitely attractive. Jose Ruiz integrates ordinary life, lived in ordinary places, with the vastly wider abstract curve of the collective awareness that surrounds it.