John Ruszel is an artist living and working in Berkeley, California. Ruszel’s work explores scientific concepts, the equipment used to study them, and the visualizations created to explain them. Through his understanding of these concepts and through a process of oversimplification and iteration, he creates highly organized, graphic artworks. These works visually and symbolically suggest of their sources, but stripped of any scientific rigor or meaning.
Ruszel’s works are creating using both digital and traditional drafting tools. The works are conjured in computer-aided design and drafting software like AutoCAD and AxiDraw pen plotter. Once his compositions are planned digitally, Ruszel moves to a drafting board, where he executes the drawings on paper by hand using a drafting arm, and paints the pieces with gouache. The resulting works are a viewing experience, as, from afar, the works are graphic, resolute, and feel satisfyingly simple. However, upon stepping closer, the viewer is absorbed into Ruszel’s now obviously human process. His drafting marks, used to plot each move, hover around and constrain his vibrant lines and forms. In each, you can see his brushstrokes in the chalky gouache, and the hand-drawn lines which defined them.
Ruszel is uninterested in the scientific “truths” which inspire his practice; rather, he has developed a process that he describes as feeling like a “prayer” to what he sees as the most hopeful and meaningful pursuits of humanity as a whole. “Prayer is a charged word and I use it here irreligiously. I see prayer as an act that expends energy towards a goal in a manner that cannot affect real change towards that goal. It is action without reaction; a spell that is cast only to conjure hope. I make my art as an attempt to feel that change is possible, knowing that my art practice cannot bring that change. It is a personal attempt at creating hope,” Ruszel writes in his artist statement.