Francesc Ruiz’s second solo show at Madrid’s garcía galería delves into the visual communication of one of Spain’s most iconic institutions, the Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos—the national postal service, commonly known as Correos—whose graphic identity was created in 1977 by Spanish designer and artist José María Cruz Novillo (b. 1936). Ruiz’s interest is not limited to Cruz Novillo’s pervasive design, but more broadly includes Correos as an agent of distribution as well as the various commercial guises that come into play in this public service. Ruiz’s choice to focus this exhibition on the postal system, the pre-eminent pre-internet network, is not casual: through his characteristic strategy of “expanded comics” he has long been concerned with the potential of distribution and official versus alternative forms of circulation. “To design is to designate,” Cruz Novillo once declared. Since the late 1960s, he has been largely responsible for the construction of a Spanish institutional iconography, allocating enduring visual identities to copious private and state-owned companies such as ministerial departments, Renfe (Spanish National Railway Network), the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) or the former peseta bank notes, to name only a few. Conferring fresh new identities on institutions following 40 grim years of dictatorship, …