MONOCHROMES — Analytical Fresco in the Present Tense

Within Fabrizio Ruggiero’s practice, monochrome is not conceived as an aesthetic minimalism, but as an operative condition: a space in which painting is relieved of narrative urgency and returned to a state of attentive presence. By engaging fresco as both medium and method, the monochrome reintroduces duration, irreversibility, and material responsibility into the contemporary image.

The surface becomes a site of accumulation and erasure, where layers, traces, and tonal inflections articulate a process-based conception of painting. Structure replaces representation; the image is approached as a field rather than a depiction. In this sense, the monochrome operates as an analytical device, foregrounding the conditions of visibility rather than its outcomes.

Resonating with critical discourses on the grid and the will toward silence, these works propose a suspension of expressive rhetoric. The viewer is invited into a contemplative encounter, in which perception unfolds slowly and the image resists immediate consumption. The monochrome thus becomes an ethical proposition: an economy of attention within an accelerated visual culture.