Pietro Ruffo

Pietro Ruffo chooses for his works the long time of painstaking, patient execution that decants the seething matter of current political events, which cools the huge themes of injustice and war, allowing him to address them in a primarily mental and speculative rather than ideological dimension. His is a work born "out of artillery attacks, air raids and diplomatic negotiations," as Boetti said of his tracings of the contours of countries at war. Like Boetti, Ruffo chooses to read and interrogate reality by putting his subjectivity in parentheses, preferring, rather than taking overly defined positions that he knows can be authoritarian and partial, to stimulate individual capacities for thought and expression. Thus even his seemingly more direct and provocative works actually aim not to provide a personal point of view but to open a dialogue. To offer doubts, insights, to rekindle the critical spirit.