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FABRIZIO RUGGIERO
When admiring the frescoes from Pompeii in his early years in Naples, Fabrizio Ruggiero felt that sense of awe and wonder that for the ancient Greeks was the beginning of knowledge. In 1984 he moved to Tuscany and established Architectura Picta, an innovative workshop where he started to reflect on the internal structure of the language of fresco painting that he had developed using contemporary technologies.
Over the last thirty years, Fabrizio Ruggiero spent long periods in Asia, where he explored the Indian thought and searched for visual patterns common to different cultures, summarizing the results in a graphic work, which he called Family Resemblances in homage to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
His interest for the shape and format of the painting support led him to compare the relationship between form, material and space focusing on the form in space. His research takes place along the axis of modeling, shaping in a soft manner. Looking for lightness in his abstract sculptures, he uses mats of reeds and plaster that are one of the distinctive characteristics of his sculptures. Later on he became interested in portrait and considers the human face to be a territory, and painting as the process to build a map of it. In 2001 he collaborated with the Global Pagoda project, the largest Buddhist pagoda in the world, under construction in Gorai Creek, near Mumbai, India. In 2006 his project The Summer Triangle. Orpheus, Deneb and Altair won the competition for the redevelopment of the Raggiolo tunnel, in Casentino. In 2010, in the splendid setting of a former church of the Poppi Medieval Castle in the niche of the altarpiece, he placed A Bruit Secret & Pandora's Box, the fresco of a Ready-made by Duchamp inside the Pandora's Box of Contemporary Art.
In 2014 his project Tribute To Traditions: Cultural Diversity In Unity became a permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Cameroon in Yaoundé. In 2015, a selection of his portraits of remarkable women, Le Monde des Femmes, was exhibited at the Maison de la Chine in Paris, France. The same year a major exhibition of his sculptures and sixteen portraits dedicated to the theme The Transformative Power of Art was held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of the United Nations. In September 2015 a selection of his works were exhibited at the New York University's Casa Italiana in New York.
His most recent exhibit, The Transformative Power of Art and Ideas was held from April 26 to June 15 2017 at La Limonaia of Villa La Pietra, former residence of Sir Harold Acton and today Campus of New York University in Florence, Italy. |
