Mateo Ruiz Gonzalez
On the seventh day, creation found its quiet end, and there was rest. The peace that followed was spent in contemplation of the divine work—its stillness reflecting on what had been built with care, a pause for what had been shared, and the ache that arrives with letting go.
Seventh Summer is a meditation on intimacy of the artist's seven-year relationship. Rather than recounting the story as a narrative, Mateo Ruiz González works through fragments of memory, gesture, landscape, and domestic space, drawing from sustained research to construct a visual language for experiences that resist direct description. Moving between observation and introspection, the photographs taken over seven years accumulate into an atmosphere shaped by closeness, absence, and the gradual recognition of an ending. Like memory itself, they emerge as partial, associative, and often elusive, inhabiting the emotional spaces around attachment and release, presence and disappearance—a testimony to the emotions that filled the spaces between two lovers, and the solitude that lingered, even in companionship.
An original text by George Weld opens the book, entering an evocative space through the act of naming. Allusive to the idea of Eden, the text explores the love between two people inhabiting a world of their own. Through fragmented sentences, repetition, and compound words, Weld evokes the imperfect and evolving nature of language between two lovers. His writing extends the photographs into a parallel meditation on love and the fragile world the characters live in.
At the center of Seventh Summer is the act of tending: to a relationship, to memory, and ultimately to the work itself. The book follows a continuous act of creation by the artist, from image-making to self-publishing, where the process of making becomes a way of reflecting and healing. Like the seventh day that follows six days of creation, the seventh summer becomes a period of pause—a space for reflection after the work of building, and for finding peace within its ending.
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9.45x13 inches. 80 pages. 35 duotone plates on Favini arte drawing natural uncoated paper and UV image coating. Vellum dust jacket with foil stamp text. Swiss binding with open spine and lilac thread. Soft cover with tip-in image. Designed by Mateo Ruiz Gonzalez and Cody Haltom. Original Text by George Weld. Poem excerpt by Richard Siken.
$80.00