Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò (NYU)

The exhibition presented at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò of New York University situates Fabrizio Ruggiero’s practice within an institutional context devoted to cultural transmission, critical thought, and the dialogue between historical memory and contemporary research. Within this academic and cultural framework, the fresco — a medium historically associated with monumentality and permanence — is reactivated as a contemporary language capable of articulating presence, temporality, and symbolic density.

Ruggiero’s large-scale portraits and pictorial structures do not function as representations of individual identity, but as effigies: thresholds between the singular and the collective, between visibility and withdrawal. The image is conceived not as depiction, but as a field in which material, time, and perception intersect. The fresco surface becomes an epistemic space, where the process of construction remains legible and where the work manifests itself as a stratified event rather than a fixed object.

Within the corridors of Casa Italiana, the works operate as a silent architecture of presence. They do not narrate; they expose conditions of appearing. The human figure, fragmented and reassembled through procedural rigor, emerges as a site of tension between form and disappearance, between the persistence of memory and the instability of meaning. The exhibition thus proposes painting not as illustration, but as a mode of thought made visible.

In this institutional context, the project articulates a broader reflection on contemporary painting as a critical practice: one that inhabits the threshold between tradition and research, between the weight of historical technique and the openness of conceptual inquiry. The fresco, stripped of nostalgia, becomes a device for interrogating the conditions of visibility, the construction of the image, and the role of art as a reflective structure within cultural institutions.