Cinzia Ruggeri at Federico Vavassori / Milan

Originally published in Italian by author Marco Tagliafierro. I translated the review into English for Flash Art Issue 320 May 2018. 

Cinzia Ruggeri’s works are intersections where geography and history, invention and tradition, technique and form visibly meet. Sometimes the titles of the works describe the objects on view, offering semantic friction but also achieving a prosaic quality: Premere per azionare il defibrillatore acrilico su tela, molla, cuore [Press to operate the acrylic defibrillator on canvas, spring, heart]; Reggiseno con coppe mosaic [Bra with mosaic cups]; Abito salame, [Salami dress]. This is Cinzia Ruggeri. Titled “Umbratile con Brio” [Lively Introverted], the show at Federico Vavassori “exhibits and articulates an eclectic, surreal and multimedia way of seeing,” as curator Mariuccia Casadio writes. It is “a journey back and forth in time, through themes, earthy tones, places and objects that synthesize its history and style.” The extraordinary plurality that characterizes Ruggeri’s path suggests how her designs, sculptures, accessories, paintings, and artifacts are created for specific places and moments: an unleashed succession of points, linked to the artist’s history, revealing complex and manifold relationships that never repeat with an identical formula. History and geography provide fundamental guides for understanding the works, whose results surmount the very coordinates that limit them. Ruggeri always seeks out the riskiest expanses, but also those that are most sensory, presenting the project as a linguistic act as well as a cultural gesture in an anthropological sense. The whole of the present and the past condenses and becomes rarefied — a breath. Everything goes and then everything returns to how it had been. A testament to the precious encounter between Ruggeri’s works and Casadio’s curating is a box: a limited-edition microcosm that contains something that we know and something that we do not know about Ruggeri. In it, the objects from the exhibition are repurposed and modified at different periods of time so as to implode — or, on the contrary, expand — in spatial contexts that are physically distant from their original.

Abito Salame. Net, pearl, hanger, and clothes pegs. 1989. Courtesy Galleria Federico Vavassori.