Pietro Ruffo "L'Ultimo Meraviglioso Minuto"
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Pietro Ruffo has received several important public and private commissions, leading him to expand his work to an urban dimension.In 2019-2020 – on the occasion of the centenary of the Garbatella district – together with 100 students from the Department of Architecture of the Roma Tre University, he carried out a work on the idea of reconstructing, conserving and preserving the cultural heritage of places, marking urban spaces stratified, modeled on the entire thickness of the culture of social groups.In 2021 he realized the work Migrante, for Parco dei Daini in Villa Borghese, Rome.
Several collaborations with important fashion houses: he designed urban scale installations for the Valentino Fall-Winter 2015/2016 Haute Couture show in Piazza di Spagna in Rome and for the Dior Fall-Winter 2017/2018 Haute Couture show at the Hôtel National des Invalides in Paris, for the maison’s 70th anniversary; on the occasion of the 2019 Venice Biennale he designed the dresses for the Tiepolo Ball, a re-enactment of the iconic ball of 1951, in which Christian Dior and Salvador Dalí worked together to create the costumes for the event.
L'Ultimo Meraviglioso Minuto
For this exhibition, Pietro Ruffo presents sculptures/paintings in relief that resume his research on the hortus, the botanical garden. Starting from the 16th century, the botanical garden, with its scientific and medical aspect, became a place throughout Europe where people tried to acclimatize all known plants. It is this attempt at synthesis and inventory that fascinates the artist. Pietro Ruffo is closely interested in the historical stagnation of involuntary similarities between cultures, inevitably anchored to their environment, which is thus overcome by the mobility of superior cultures that have learned to move in historical time as if across the globe. More than a tangible formal correspondence, it is the notion of incomprehensibility that motivates this approach.
L’Ultimo Meraviglioso Minuto, curated by Sébastien Delot, is the catalogue of the solo exhibition of the same name by Pietro Ruffo at Palazzo Esposizioni Roma. The exhibition, promoted by the Department of Culture of Rome Capital and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – as well as produced and organised by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, is the largest ever dedicated to the artist by a public institution. As the curator Sébastien Delot writes, “anthropology has recently gained a place of honour in the artist’s thought. What fascinates him so much is undoubtedly the ability of this discipline to make intelligible the way in which organisms fit into the world, acquire a stable representation of it and contribute to modifying it by creating links, constant or occasional, with it and with other living beings”. Pietro Ruffo questions the impact of man on the Earth, exploring the legitimacy of the term Anthropocene and condensing the history of our planet and knowledge in the works exhibited. The book is accompanied by texts by Marco Delogu, Ivana Della Portella, Sébastien Delot, Sofia Di Gravio, Rebecca Wragg Sykes and Guido Rebecchini.
