BIOGRAPHY

PATH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PAST EXHIBITIONS

STUDIO

THE PATH

Between 1966 and 1978 Fabrizio Ruggiero created hand-painted and printed textiles for pret-à-porter collections, gradually being involved in planning the full cycle of printed and woven necktie and foulard collections in silk and cashmere. Thus Fabrizio Ruggiero had occasion to take part in that "Challenge of restrictions" in shaping patterns that, as Sir E. H. Gombrich says: " offers an incomparable understanding of the operations of our sense of order in the perception of complex patterns".

Towards the end of that period Fabrizio Ruggiero focused his attention on the study of rhythmic structures and on the interesting phenomena illustrating the enrichment of information, that results when a description melts with another. Fabrizio Ruggiero has gathered the results of his research in a graphic port-folio containing geometrical patterns divided by families according to what L: Wittgenstain calls " familiar resemblances ". An interest in perception theory developed during the years he was studying architecture (unfinished) and a passion for oriental thinking led him to spend six years in the Indian sub-continent in successive journeys between 1971 and 1984, where he came in touch with Buddhist thought as a "point of view " (Darshan) into which perception and form theory naturally develops as the rules and practice of life. In India he found a live art tradition not so different from that 'dottrina ' (doctrine) that according to Dante " amor.. ditta dentro". (" Love... dictates inside the heart".). Dante exposed his 'dottrina' in the letter to Can Grande della Scala: " None of the works have been undertaken for a speculative result, but for a practical purpose ... to move those who live their lives in misery and to push them towards bliss". It is a bit difficult to accept such an argument nowadays, but already Plato (in Thimeus 470, cfr.908.) maintained that the Muses have been given to us " so that we can use them intellectually not as a source of irrational pleasure, but as an aid to the cycle of the soul within ourselves, whose harmony was lost by birth, to allow us to set it in order and to make it consonant with itself ". A conception of art then very different from that of contemporary art, that reduces works of art to experiences of an essentially sensitive nature. Oriental as well as medieval philosophy has defined art as. " The right way of doing things " (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-11, 57. 3 e 5), so art is nothing but the right reasoning concerning things that can be made. It then comes naturally to ask the question whether an unfragmented action exists, which is correct and accurate, whole and religious, meaning by the word religious (from Latin verb religare, to bind, to knot) the capacity to join together all the efforts to discover where thought is and what are its limitations, so that it is possible to then go behind it. At the foundation of all art, worthy of this name, there is always a transformation of man and we should notice that the dominant characteristics of our world, are disorder, uncertainty, sentimentalism and despair. Our comfortable faith in progress has been shaken and ours is a world of impoverished reality, a world in which we go on living as if life would be an end in itself and had no meaning whatsoever. Certainly we should take notice that at the very root of everything there is thought and so it would be quite interesting to ask the question about what is the very nature of thought and if thought could be aware of itself and of its movement. By observation we can see how thought is a movement and movement implies time, thus thought is movement as time, thought is memory stored in the brain as experience and knowledge. At the same time from the accumulation of experience stored in the brain as knowledge, the answer to the challenge of life comes and that answer is thought again! Thought being fragmented has created this world that is fragmented and that cannot understand what is whole, integers and total. Can thought then be aware of itself, aware of where it is essential to act, where to be accurate in its operations, and also to be limited in every other direction? So Art is above all the skill of putting everything in life in its proper place and thus to understand what is the ambit of thought and to set the limits of it.

Art as truth is a pathless land.

Fabrizio Ruggiero's studio is located up in the hills surrounding Anghiari, in Tuscany, Italy.
In his studio Fabrizio Ruggiero constructs works whose intention is to bring the mind of the observer, even for an instant, out from the mechanism of thought. To allow this to happen, Fabrizio Ruggiero constructs the surfaces of his works in ways that hook the sight, playing with what Sir Aby Warburg defined as Denkraumverlust, the tendency of the human spirit to confuse the sign or mark with its meaning, the name with the object that it designates, to inspire a reflection on the perceptions that are then always connected to the complete image that we have of the universe. To make his works more effective they are often constructed as an assembly of different materials. Fabrizio Ruggiero's preferred technique is that of the fresco which he carries out using cartoons and glazes and the modern technological innovations that allow him to create his pieces in his own studio, even for large surface areas, and then mount the final work in its intended site. Fabrizio Ruggiero's activity is involved in planning and constructing symbolic spaces as a support for contemplation and reminiscence, that special activity of the spirit that Plato called anamnesis where the soul, in the presence of tangible things, finds itself again through the contemplation of ideas. And Plato reminds us even that: " The ability to remember does not depend on the visible resemblance but on the congruence of construction ".