De Arte Fingendi Drama
Abstract sculptures
This selection presents a core segment of Fabrizio Ruggiero’s sculptural research, developed across site-specific installations and public contexts,
with particular reference to the project The Transformative Power of Art presented at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Dates are intentionally absent.
The temporal horizon of these works is not that of linear chronology, but that of presence.
Each encounter unfolds within the time of the viewer’s attention — in the lived duration of looking, pausing, and moving through the work.
Time, in this context, is not an archival measure but an experiential condition.
The works do not belong to a past that can be catalogued; they come into being in the present of their reception.
What matters is not when they were made, but how they are encountered — here and now.
Elusive Harmony
Wood, pigments
200 × 160 × 30 cm
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
Gaia’s Interlocking Web
Cane mat, pigments
240 × 150 × 50 cm
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
The works presented here initiate a shift from image to structure.
Sculpture is conceived not as the extraction of form from a solid mass, but as a constructive process in which material is progressively articulated.
The gesture remains visible within the work, and form retains the memory of its making.
Rising from the Ashes
Cane mat, pigments
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
Totem of a Vanished People
Cane mat, pigments
150 × 270 × 80 cm
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
Lone Survivor of a Sea Crossing
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
160 × 270 × 80 cm
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
Across these works, balance emerges as both a formal and conceptual principle.
The structures appear to negotiate gravity rather than overcome it, situating themselves in a state of controlled tension.
This suspension resists monumentality and instead foregrounds a fragile equilibrium.
ES-O-ter
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
160 × 220 × 40 cm
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
In Incognito
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
160 × 270 × 80 cm
The Transformative Power of Art, United Nations Visitors Lobby, New York
The Use of the Word
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
220 × 70 × 70 cm
Thinker
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
220 × 90 × 70 cm
The gradual expansion from surface to volume marks a decisive threshold in Ruggiero’s practice.
Sculpture thus becomes a mediating device between the logic of painting and the condition of installation,
opening a zone in which form remains in ongoing negotiation with space and perception.
Four Fragments
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
560 × 270 × 80 cm
Flying Carpet
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
560 × 270 × 80 cm
Narcissus
Cane mat, mortar, pigments
560 × 270 × 80 cm
Read together, these works outline a trajectory in which sculpture progressively detaches itself from the pictorial plane and enters the domain of spatial
presence. What emerges is a quiet dramaturgy of matter: a choreography of forms that propose states of attentive balance — fragile, provisional, and ethically charged.
