“The risk of constantly renewed existential confrontation, as vital fact, and the pursuit of a still more convincing possibility or communicative and emotive representation of such a condition of Dassein”.

Piero Ruggeri, one of the masters of Art Informel in Turin, addressed the problem of revitalising gestural painting throughout his career, returning cyclically to earlier themes and motifs periodically resumed on reaching new stages of maturation. When the movement was dialectically superseded in the late 1950s, he embarked on the path of post-Informel developments that nonetheless maintained dialogue with that artistic experience and thus came during the 1960s to create a series of images in which a figurative allusion emerges from thick impasto, shaped with the brush and often scratched. It is for this reason that the Roman critic Enrico Crispolti invited him in 1960 to take part in an important group exhibition entitled Possibilità di relazione at Bruno Sargentini’s Galleria l’Attico in Rome. Having been described as an “aformal” painter in 1957 in the context of a three-man show with Mario Merz and Sergio Saroni at Luciano Pistoi’s Galleria Notizie (with which Crispolti was closely connected), he now changed course in an attempt to establish a relationship between the rapid gesturality that delves into matter and external reality, thus returning to a concept of representation. This led Ruggeri in the late 1960s to produce the Napoleon series of barely-sketched figures in a dark and narrow space from which a circular form emerges in the centre like an eye or a cockade on a general’s hat, dragged into a whirl of violent, agitated marks that is at the same time inserted into a clearly visible compositional structure. This period saw an alternation of Napoleons, Napoleonic generals and Napoleonic figures culminating in the major work Generale Marat but also others based on the same compositional principles, including Uomo ‘71 (Man ’71) and other generic human figures. The possibility cannot be ruled out that this was a long-term effect of the major Francis Bacon exhibition organised by Luigi Carluccio in Turin at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in 1962, when the British master’s work had been circulating for nearly ten years in Italy and attracting the interest of critics and collectors above all in Turin and Milan. 

The idea put forward by Bacon of a figure as a lump of matter and signs, which erase the features while leaving a face or figure recognisable in the centre of a large, dark expanse, may have prompted Ruggeri to place some elements within a delimited area of the painting making possible the analogical recognition of a human figure. In the process of painting, this took place through the alternation of large expanses of saturated colour (generally red or black) with concentrations of matter shaped and rippled with the brush that identify the iconographic nuclei of most interest. As Marco Valsecchi observed in his presentation of a show of Ruggeri’s recent paintings in 1968 at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan: “In the mirror of the painting - where reality and dream, life and nightmare mix to form gory amalgamations in the nooks and crannies - the image is built up out of violent inserts and embeddings, blazing inlays, as though clotted through some difficult rite.”¹ Two years after the production of Uomo ’71, Carluccio instead insisted that in Ruggeri, “the desire to last is an instinct”, in the sense that he was devoured by an authentic fury that is “simply but totally engaged in a struggle with some dark despair, with the mysterious and ineluctable energy that has given its existence the form of painting”.² 

The following stage in Ruggeri’s career - from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, coinciding with his move from Turin to Avigliana - is characterised by the series of Roveti or Thorn Bushes and other subjects connected with nature, which suggest the resumption of themes linked to the “naturalism” of the 1950s. At the same time, this new phase marks a more relaxed relationship with art or even “renewed faith in painting”,³ in which he depicted natural motifs with his customary freshness and immediacy, following his emotional impulses. With respect to the construction of a setting, sometimes summarily suggested, in the figurative period of the 1960s, the Roveti and other similar series take us back to the idea of a “vegetal wall” or rather of painting that presents itself to the viewer as an authentic vertical wall on which painting creates a tangle of signs similar to the interweaving of thick vegetation into which we must plunge so as to lose all awareness of space. For Ruggeri, however, this expedient serves above all to present the quick transcription of some existential tension on the canvas. As Crispolti points out in the last major monographic study written on the artist during his lifetime (1996), it is on this that the “risk” of Ruggeri’s painting hinges: “The risk of constantly renewed existential confrontation, as vital fact, and the pursuit of a still more convincing possibility or communicative and emotive representation of such a condition of Dassein”.⁴ 

Luca Pietro Nicoletti 

¹ M. Valsecchi, in Milan 1968a, np. 

² L. Carluccio, in Milan 1973, np. 

³ E. Crispolti, “Una ‘poetica’ del vissuto emotivo”, in Crispolti, Fanelli, Trento 1996, p. 103. 

⁴ Ibid., p. 98.