Pietro Ruffo, STRATIFICATIONS

Room 10

«In the flags I design, the national colours are replaced by animal skulls. The latter have a double meaning: on the one hand they represent a symbol of aggression with their teeth in full view and their jaws open. On the other hand, because they are almost overlapping, they represent the stratification of the people on their territory, similar to fossils found underground. The intention of these works is not to understand the reasons for the conflicts, but rather to analyse the feeling of self-defence experienced by these peoples on a daily basis, and thus to represent peoples who are strongly stratified in their territory, where they need to develop a form of aggression in order to survive.»
Pietro Ruffo

«Skulls and cockroaches, death and resurrection: there is nothing political or religious in Ruffo’s work, although it is the symbols of a contemporary conflict that speak: Hamas, Israel, the United States and others are paradoxically linked by the corruption of time, inevitable decadence, the perception of a past that leaves behind a vague smell of burning, the last trace of a combustion that took place in the shadow of the failed dialectic between identity and territoriality, between history and politics. Ruffo does not let us enter the private enclosure of his existence, he shows it to us, but excludes us. This is his boundary, and this is the price of his coherence.»
Edoardo Testori

THE ARTIST

Pietro Ruffo was born in Rome in 1978, where he lives and works. He has had his most important solo exhibitions in the capital: in 2005 Flag at the AKA Gallery and in 2007 Six Nations at the Lorcan O’Neill Gallery. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in cities such as London, Algiers, Sendai, Berlin and New York. In 2006 he installed a permanent work in the confessionals of the Chiesa del Santo Volto di Gesù in Rome, in collaboration with architects Sartogo and Grenon, and in the same year he created a wall painting in collaboration with patients of the psychiatric hospital of Colmar in France. In 2008 he participated in the exhibition 1988, twenty years before twenty years after at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Pecci in Prato and exhibited Nothing New Under the Sand at the Testori U.K. gallery in London. In 2009 he held the exhibitions GRASWEG at the Lorcan O’Neill Gallery in Rome, and Pietro Ruffo at the MAR in Ravenna. In Pesaro, at the Centro Arti Visive Peschiera, he presented the exhibition Pietro Ruffo, un istante complesso.