To mark its inauguration, the Maribel López Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition featuring one of the leading artists on the current Spanish scene. In the work he has developed in recent years, with drawing as its starting point, Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971) deploys an array of ‘possible’ fictions, laden with irony and bordering on delirium, which encompass multiple horizons of escaping from and re-inventing reality. In his work, ink drawings alternate with other media, such as installations of black-and-white photocopies glued to the wall, videos and sculptures.

In Game Over Expanded, the artist renews his interest in the metaphoric power of the act of consumption, of the spaces where it unfolds –malls, department stores, the high street– and of the waste it generates. Ruiz’s drawings propose a re-working of these venues, bringing out the complex and often delirious psychological dynamic which nurtures conventional notions of the urban precinct and social belonging. However, this subversion of the commonplace spawns a potentially infinite horizon of re-invention, both personal and collective.

The exhibition opens with a series in which the KaDeWe department store becomes the stage for an alternative reality where customers, staff and passers-by abandon themselves to all manner of strategies and drives—shopping, it goes without saying, but also watching, having fun and even turning the space into something totally different.

Alongside this work is a series of drawings set in various shopping areas in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district. These images feature an unidentified group of people who step into the window displays of a number of stores to endow them with a message and generate something akin to visual sequences, thus setting up a newfound communication with the pedestrians busy shopping. This series epitomizes the artist’s interest in intimating speculative spin-offs of urban reality, as well as in transposing certain grammatical aspects of the comic to real-life settings with the aim of altering or prompting a change in or commentary on the ethos of the city.

This new project is rounded off by a sculpture displaying a sea of objects inspired by an urban waste which the artist has vivified by again taking recourse to the comic, so that the various scraps of rubbish seemingly communicate among themselves and with the viewer. This is trash that speaks through images and texts; trash with a memory which provides us with clues as to its origin.

All the works in this exhibition have some bearing on its title, yielding an explicit metaphor of video games and the idea of an ‘imprecise ending’. Game Over Expanded points to the possibility that, even after the apparent end of a game, we could continue playing it using the leftovers it has generated—just as we could build something new out of rubbish, or as new stories could issue from the remains of window displays.