Pools and Tables

Paloma Ruiz Chong is a Mexican artist born in Hermosillo, Sonora, where she’s had two solo exhibitions including “Soy Constelación” (Casa Ganfer, 2021) and the Distrito 60 inaugural opening later that year. Ruiz is the recipient of two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grants which she received in 2021 and 2023. She moved to Vancouver in 2021 to pursue painting and holds a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 2025.

Ruiz’s work plays with large fields of color and shapes to explore the ways that color can activate itself; Activations that can happen in and outside of the canvas. She believes her use of color, as one of the most fundamental pilars of the paintings, should be exciting, instinctual and indulgent. While her approach to figuration is based in the character of abstract painting, one that isn’t exactly concerned with the subject matter but the paint itself and its tactile expressivity, the forms become recognizable and play on familiar landmarks. In the painting, the objects fluctuate from still lives to animated characters that become enlivened under dramatic spotlights, making theatricality and scenography recurrent themes.

Ruiz works from a personal archive of photographs and the recent body of work relies heavily on her drawing practice, including quick sharpie sketches that provide freshness. She is prompted by her immediate present, dissolving episodes of the everyday onto compositions, but also collages moments in time. Color does not just exist descriptively in the visual realm but also associatively, binding us to the past, present and future. Spontaneous thought, inside jokes, automatism, clichés, the kitschy, childhood, growing up in northern Mexico; the bits that linger and that leave marks, she lets make their way into her paintings. The most recent paintings are scenes of drink tables at night, beam lights emerging from the top, flooding color and often feature a flower pattern, rainbows or stars; This is work that is completely guided by pleasure and a desire to experiment in a language that is playful. Painting in this attitude is almost a mode of self preservation and a way of thinking about high energy as the force that propels Ruiz forward in her practice.