PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI    - Italy

PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI

Presents his exhibition: “An Italian Painter on the Côte d’Azur” at the Parc Hôtel Boscolo in Nice.

This exhibition is an encounter with a visionary where all reality is abolished; it plunges us, with delight, into a world of adolescents who couldn’t care less about being understood, who oppose academicism as one opposes one’s parents.

Paolo Massimo Ruggeri is perceived as a “beast of art”, built on certain supernatural gifts rooted in eloquence, staging, and the fascination of light and colour.

He draws us into a bath of passion, of never-exhausted discovery, where everything is intelligently illuminated in a multiplication of images and ideas, in a colourful blend with no ties to the past.

He creates a new path, a new culture in a psychic game to feel better, where depression is excluded.
Malraux said: < The French are sad Italians > Paolo Massimo Ruggeri offers his French fellow citizens a cultural visual programme where they find the pleasure of thinking along new lines of force and in a wonder of colours.

< Hats off to the Artist! >.

Paul TOMATIS

Translated from French

PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI

Presents his solo exhibition: “An Italian Painter on the Côte d’Azur” at the Parc Hôtel Boscolo in Nice.

This exhibition is an encounter with a visionary where all reality is abolished; it immerses us, with pleasure, in a world of adolescents who don’t give a damn about being understood, who oppose academicism as one opposes one’s own parents.

Paolo Massimo Ruggeri is perceived as an “animal of art”, shaped by certain supernatural gifts based on eloquence, staging, and the charm of light and colour.

He lets us enter a bath of passion, a never-ending discovery where everything is intelligently illuminated in a multiplying of images and ideas, on a blend of colours with no ties to the past.

He creates a new path, a new culture in a physical game to feel better, where depression is excluded.
Malraux said: < The French are sad Italians > Paolo Massimo Ruggeri offers his French fellow citizens a cultural visual programme where they find the pleasure of thinking within new lines of force and in a marvel of colours.

< Hats off to the Artist! >.

Paul TOMATIS

                                A relaxing message: the painting of
                                                PAOLO MASSIMO RUGGERI

Artists who manage to communicate immediately to their audience at least part of the sensations they felt in front of reality, or that thrilled them during the creative process (if they paint from imagination), are those who succeed in truly entering the spirit of the themes they address and expressing their contents as if they were part of themselves.

The artist becomes the spokesperson for things; things speak through him and use a simple, accessible language in a one-to-one dialogue. When a speech is needed to explain a work of art, it is a sign that at least some of the components that should be able to express it fully in visual terms are missing.
Art is an expressive form of communication that must be sufficient unto itself: it must speak without the need to resort to other means, in order to be understood and even just “felt”.

In front of Ruggeri’s paintings, we believe the observer can, without exception, be immediately won over and experience much of the sensations the author perceived in his encounter with the reality that impressed him, and that he reworked to exalt its contents, with a form of “translation” that seeks to make understanding more immediate and complete.

But to explain the happy results achieved by this artist there are other reasons that add to those of his successful painterly mechanics: reasons that rise from deep within and justify his constant state of grace, in the face of the spectacle of his paintings.

He began, as a boy, to love painting, but he managed to devote himself to it only after a long wait and after a profound crisis from which only art—and this art, practised in a total sense and in complete surrender—could free him, as it did. His spirit needed complete relaxation that perhaps only painting could give him, but using painting not as a trade or as a distraction.

Paolo Massimo Ruggeri had this favourable atmosphere around him, but the right moment had to come for his state of mind to perceive the hidden contents of the environment, push him to deepen his observation and try to interpret them. He succeeded, and for years now he has continued with a passion and enthusiasm that grow as his “craft” allows him to fix, in an ever more immediate and concise way, the features of what has become the object of an emotional exaltation.

We would say that one of the fundamental components, in the artist’s heartfelt translations, is silence; that silence that allows him to concentrate and condense sensations, but also to perceive the vibrations of the atmosphere, to mark them in rapid strokes of colour that he displays without second thoughts—sure and precise—because everything he has seen is now built within him and only awaits the means to show itself and manifest itself even in the lightest and most hidden values.

Ruggeri’s painting is intense, free and full of breath precisely because it has matured in serenity of spirit within him, before he sets the expressive mechanism in motion to bring it onto the support placed before him, which must become the transmissible document of his emotion. And one always feels the silence, high and deep, in the temple in which the miracle of transfiguration is accomplished by virtue of a “priest” always inspired and committed to making the propitiatory rite, with profound spiritual dedication.

 Ursula Petrone