Artist's book (zine).
BDPD plays on an expression that is as fictitious as it is transparent, "bédé pédé", by which the artist refers to a whole body of homoerotic comic books to which the drawings on display in the exhibition pay homage and from which they draw inspiration. The artist works with the abbreviated and condensed version of the terms—"bdpd"—which he transforms into a trope whose repetition ("bdpdbdpdbdpd") evokes both the algorithms of conceptual art and sequences of genetic code. From this starting point, he explores the possibilities of creating a pornotypographic language to which he gives various forms, speculating on the closet, the circulation of desire, encrypted communication and the transitivity of alternative hentai.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at La Salle de bains, Lyon, from June 11 to October 10, 2026.
Drawing, typography and graphic design are the tools used by Francesc Ruiz (born 1971, lives and works in Barcelona) to modify the publications that he mobilises in his installations, which for several years have tended towards architectural structures such as kiosks, bookshops, record shops or libraries.
Francesc Ruiz is fascinated by the aesthetic of the comic books of which he has been an avid reader since childhood, and he is particularly interested in their narrative construction and the complexity of social systems conveyed by this aesthetic.
Erotic and homosexual comic books in particular enable him to deal with issues such as censorship and creative freedom and thus to examine the evolution of social and individual identities. In parallel to his socio-political explorations Francesc Ruiz takes a more general interest, through the press and comic books, in the various aspects of popular culture which dissimulate their subversive nature behind amusing façades.
