Granada doesn’t have a contemporary art museum, but it has one of the finest grafitti artists in the world, Raúl Ruiz, El Niño de las Pinturas. (Here’s his web site.) Raúl started painting on Granada’s walls in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, besides adorning his home town with a distinguished collection of wall art, always while dodging Granada’s municipals, he’s been invited to take his work to the walls of Portugal, Holland, Italy, Venezuela, Hungary, Belgium, France, among other places. Well-documented followers calculate that Raúl has more than 2,000 murals all over the world.
His work is both idealistic and poetic, and tends to feature brief prose poems done in exquisite calligraphy along with evocative scenes of infancy and adolescence, scenes which sow tenderness and solidarity wherever he works. These human elements are contrasted with the voracious metaphoric gears and train wheels that permeate industrial society.
Raúl says:
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- “Cansado de las mismas respuestas,decidi cambiar mis preguntas”
- “¿son números lo que tu alma nutre?”
- “¿quizás el materialismo se está apoderando de nuestras almas? ”
- “¿Qué hacer con juegos que siempre se pierden?”
- “…sólo quien a renunciado a la victoria y a la derrota encuentra su camino… “
- “…y haciendo cosas que rompo para arreglarlas y volver a romperlas paso mi tiempo…”
- “y el tiempo se acaba…y la vida no espera…”
- “el mundo está oscuro…ilumina tu parte…”
- “Y donde miro si ojos no tengo…”
Tired of the same old answers, I decided to change my questions
is it numbers that your soul nourishes?
Perhaps materialism is devouring our souls,
What shall we do with games that are always getting lost?
only one who renounces victory and defeat can find his way…
making things that I break, just to mend them, then break them again, I spend my time…
and time runs out… life doesn’t wait…
the world is dark… enlighten your part…
Where do I look if I don’t have eyes?
Printmaking Courses in Spain 