BOLTHOLE

Are we what we project or what we hide? Bolthole, by Leonor Ruiz Dubrovin, is an exhibition in which identity is questioned, where what is represented is a dramatization of being.

In the contemporary times we live in, it is very difficult to find the authenticity of people because many present themselves through all kinds of filters. In her works, the artist takes a tour through a present stage -understood as a non place–    where the construction of the self is, often, a set of lies that ends up revealing several half-truths. Many of them hurtful as well as disconcerting, as shown in her canvases.

Perhaps what is disturbing about her paintings, thanks to that polished technique of glazes, are not the figures themselves, since their beauty could calm what upsets us, but rather the knowledge that what we see is far from the reality we know.. Or that, that reality that we know, is very far from the ideal of peace that we seek.

Bolthole, as well as a place that sublimates the hideout so that we are more authentic than ever, is also the only refuge for aesthetes who need someone to finally represent a mythology in which we can truly recognize ourselves. No face will be the exact reflection of ours and that is precisely why we are all included there, in that search that only ends when death allows us to.

The figures that Ruiz Dubrovin creates, are glimpses of a society that far from real freedom, seeks the freedom of the individual, which in turn is nothing more than a global deception about what the authentic struggle to be who we are should be like.

The exquisiteness with which the artist presents all these questions of a philosophical nature makes viewer endure the harshness of the present without ending up destroyed by the unbearable failed construction of the being we are living.

María von Touceda – Art Critic and Curator