Francis Ruyter

By depicting scenes of people engaging in commerce and leisure in public spaces, Francis Ruyter creates works that give viewers the voyeuristic sense of looking in. Ruyter uses paint and permanent marker to recreate images from photographs that he takes, evidence of his physical presence at each scene and a way for the artist to capture the intimate angles for which he is known. Ruyter’s figurative and landscape paintings are at once realistic and synthetic, painted in non-naturalistic colors on a flattened, emphatically two-dimensional canvas. By naming many of her works after the titles of films and books, such as Where the Sidewalk Ends (2011), a delicate forest scene, Ruyter places them within the context of cultural knowledge.