It so happens I was born in Cremona in 1955, but it could have been anywhere else at any other time.

For years soft and tenuous, impalpably atmospheric paintings were my trademark. Then there was this sort of a big bang and I found my paintings suddenly turn defiantly and vibrantly colourful, brimming over with form.

I no longer believe a painting somehow represents what I’m like inside. I now think of it more as an act of creation rather than as an expression of creativity. It’s really about creating new worlds, a chromatic cosmogony where beauty and art are no longer laden by the burden of living or fraught by temptingly mellow and melancholic existential impotence but loudly proclaim that there is much more besides. I’m talking of happiness.

Obviously, there’s room for other things in my life as well. Things of greatest worth eschew telling: I talk about them through my paintings

Paolo Massimo Ruggeri