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