PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI

will be presenting his latest works in a personal exhibition called « An Italian Painter on the French Riviera » at the Parc Hôtel Boscolo in Nice.

It’s an occasion not to be missed to immerse oneself in the artist’s highly visionary world where the humdrum of everyday reality is rigorously kept at bay. It’s a world of proudly defiant youth, undaunted by miscomprehension, rebellious against academia as against parental authority.

Paolo Massimo Ruggeri has a reputation for being an “art animal”. His intimate acquaintance with art derives from his supernatural endowments that make for the arresting eloquence of his works, a striking mise en scène, and captivating light and colours.

Viewing his works is tantamount to plunging into a sea of passion; it’s a never-ending discovery with intricately miniaturised details that multiply images and ideas in a medley of colours, unfettered by ties with the past.

As a veritable trail blazer, he opens up new avenues and cultural perspectives through his art. His works engage the viewer in a game, entailing intense physical involvement, with the power to cast off even the darkest gloom.
According to Malraux < the French are dejected Italians >. Paolo Massimo Ruggeri sees to rectifying that by offering his fellow French citizens a visual and cultural experience that will afford them the opportunity and pleasure of thinking along novel energy lines in dazzling, spell-binding colours.

< Hats off for the Artist!>.

Paul TOMATIS

CHROMATIC COSMOGONY BY PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI

Large canvases bedecked with breathtakingly intense colours and free flowing forms. In a nutshell, that’s Paolo Massimo Ruggeri’s art. Born in 1955 in the city of Cremona and formally educated at Parma, this widely acclaimed master has always shunned the sort of exposure that may be had from art exhibitions and associated social events. Always highly selective and ever attentive to quality, his exhibitive curriculum is indeed very sparse. His works have been on public view in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Montecarlo, Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, Genoa, Salsomaggiore, the Este Castle in Ferrara, Milan, and Nice.

“I’m always game and willing to take risks in my work. I have an acute sense of harmony and I love seeking it in subtle and refined poises”, Ruggeri explains. “As a child I loved drawing, colouring; it was a pastime, a game for me. I remember I was highly attracted by the world of adults. You might say I came of age quickly.” The painter admits his works have spatial affinities with Klimt and glowing colours reminiscent of Van Gogh. Paolo Massimo Ruggeri softly lays out his vibrant oils across wide expanses of canvas with dynamic and dramatic effect. His paintings are cosmic compositions, where gorgeously bright figures of infinite hues developed by the artist as a veritable parthenogenesis of painting itself play out their energetic existence in total spatial freedom. Alien figures beget alien figures – freely, instinctively, endlessly. Ruggeri definitely sets aside any rationality when in the throes of creativity.

His compositions are born of instinct. There’s no rumination here. Indeed there’s a sort of detachment from self-conscious thought. It’s pure energy unleashed in the form of unrestrained draughtsmanship, spatial relations, colours, patterns, recurrent and changing. Lyrical, dreamlike, harmonic and utopian elements mix and mingle, clash and split. Dazzling colours suddenly meet and match making for dramatically graphic or sensitively subdued effects. Ideas, sensations, myths roll out in universally paradigmatic representation, forever tossing and tumbling, vying and jostling with each other, never static.

Such universality means that whatever the onlooker can make out in these paintings, each in her or his own way, is sure to be there. Free flowing and parallel universes crisscrossing each other. Ultimately, opposites are not at all that diametrically opposed but come into contact with and intersect one another, as in the painting significantly called “Touch me”. Yes, even the titles of these paintings have a magical, alchemical, enchanted allure about them. There are no 3D images or shadows to be found in Ruggeri’s paintings. There are lots of overlapping images, clues, hints and suggestions, fleeting prompts that lead to a synthesis. Here’s the absolute and primary grammar of painting, sign and colour at their primordial best.

Indeed, Ruggeri’s overwhelming canvases are doors that open out onto a poetic and visionary cosmos, symbol of his artistic endeavour.

Ermanno Sagliani

A soothing message from PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI’s paintings

Artists who manage to instantaneously convey at least a part of what they feel when confronting themselves with their surroundings or what stirs their imagination when in the throes of the creative process if painting from pure fantasy are most certainly artists who fully master their subject matter, expressing its contents as if part of themselves.

The artist thus becomes the veritable spokesperson of the objects that speak through him by means of a simple, straightforward code easily accessible by all in a process of mutual communication. That’s why a work of art calling for additional explanation under “separate cover”, so to speak, points to a lack of those elements that allow the work to fully account for itself on the visual plane.
Art is an expressive form of communication that must be capable of standing alone. It must speak for and of itself by itself; it must be able to make itself understood or merely “felt” without recourse to other means.

There’s hardly any doubt that whenever a viewer, any viewer, is confronted by one of Ruggeri’s paintings, they are almost sure of falling under its spell, sharing with Ruggeri the very same sensations felt by him upon confronting the original situation triggering his artistic endeavour, an endeavour that essentially consists in “translating” his reactions into a idiom capable of making for a more immediate and fuller comprehension of that situation.

But his mastery of technique alone cannot suffice to account for his outstanding artistic results. There are reasons that well up from deep within that explain and account for his being always in a state of artistic grace, of which the spectacle of his paintings witness to.

His love for painting as an art form stretches back to his early childhood. But many years were to pass before he was able to begin practising it, and then only after having gone through a profound personal crisis. Indeed, nought but painting, practised totally and with utter abandon, could and did free him from his sore condition. His spirit cried out for release, release that could only be had from painting, practised, though, not as a profession or by way of a diversion.

In the end, then, Paolo Massimo Ruggeri’s personal crisis was to prove nothing short of propitious for him. Initially, though, he had to wait to capture the moment when his spirit was receptive to the concealed contents of his physical surroundings and ready to make the effort to scrutinise and decipher their inner meaning. At last that moment came and his enthusiasm and commitment have since never waned, despite the passing of the years. Indeed, they have gathered momentum as his “expertise” has grown, permitting him to instantiate with increased immediacy and brevity what by now is a permanent state of heightened and intense emotional awareness.

One of the essential elements emerging from the artist’s acutely sensed linguistic transpositions is silence. It’s thanks to this silence that he can concentrate and condense his sensations, tuning into to the vibrations pervading any milieu and tapping them out with rapid and daring, colour-laden brush strokes that don’t betray the slightest pentimento. Such self-confidence and precision is born of a well structured internalisation of what he has physically experienced. This inner structure is therefore firmly in place, simply waiting to show itself and make itself known, even in its frailest and most secretive values.

Ruggeri’s paintings are always intense, unrestrained, soaring. Before setting in motion the expressive mechanics that bring out his emotions, bringing them to rest on the physical support he has in front of him and thus turning them into communicable documents, Ruggeri has pondered at length on these emotions, quietly fostering them within himself. And before them the viewer invariably perceives the lofty and deep silence pervading the temple in which the miraculous transfiguration takes place thanks to an ever inspired “priest”, faithfully committed to celebrating the propitious rite with deep spiritual devotion.

Ursula Petrone

There’s no eschewing the cosmogonic creativity, the turbulently changing colours made all the more vividly by rarefied signs and formal utopias of the Cremona-born artist Paolo Massimo Ruggeri. The optimistic conception underlying Truc aux plumes” and “Petali in decollo” may be considered a charter for a new outlook on art in which the artist enriches his fantastic images with boldly defiant colours.

Sabrina Falzone