This conversation was recorded in the context of the project The Transformative Power of Art, presented at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. In the dialogue, Fabrizio Ruggiero reflects on the role of painting as a cognitive and perceptual device, capable of slowing down the accelerated rhythms of contemporary visual culture.
Central to the interview is the idea of fresco as a contemporary practice: a medium traditionally associated with permanence and historical memory, reactivated as a critical and analytical tool. Through the discipline of fresco painting, the image becomes a site of duration, responsibility, and irreversibility, countering the ephemerality of digital production.
The conversation also touches on the symbolic dimension of the image, understood not as representation but as a threshold between perception and meaning. Ruggiero frames artistic practice as an exercise in awareness, in which vision becomes a form of meditation and the artwork functions as a space of suspension from habitual modes of thought.