PIETRO RUFFO

From historical maps in a contemporary key to the world of fashion, from tarot cards to fashion shows, from natural landscapes to wars that animate modern society day after day. A multifaceted artist, with multiple interpretations, who has achieved international success in various artistic fields.

Photo of Pietro Ruffo's studio (made by Carlotta Ceccarini)

Pietro Ruffo, one of the most appreciated young Italian artists, was born in Rome in 1978 and after his studies as an architect, he attended the Academy of New York in 2010, thanks to which he was consecrated as an artist at an international level.

When you are an architecture student, and an architect, the first thing you do when you have to design is to take a floor plan of the place or other types of mappings. So the project was born precisely from the geographical map, from the territory. (Pietro Ruffo)

Ruffo's art is inevitably linked to his architectural training, in fact it is mainly linked to projects and drawings on paper. Each of his works comes from a meticulous design where detail is preponderant for the final result. A harmonious fusion between the theoretical dimension and the figurative compositions made with cuttings and pins of paper, ceramics, tiles or painting, articulated in natural landscapes and human forms, realistic and surreal geographic maps, constellations, geometries and traces of writing.

The result of his artistic research is a work characterized by multiple layers with an infinite variety of visual and semantic interpretations that makes his two-dimensional works take on three-dimensionality. A mapping of the great themes of universal history constantly intertwined with contemporary society, within which the theme of freedom is recurring, embodied by dragonflies, which fly among its geographical maps as if the observer were teleported into a magical garden . It evokes the freedom of the individual to move without borders or restrictions. Man and his relationship with space in a map that investigates the different cultures that inhabit the Earth, where mythology and reality intersect indissolubly from the primordial centuries.

[The maps] We are passionate about it because with a single glance we are able to dominate immense surfaces and we have the impression of elevating ourselves. They also give us the opportunity to situate ourselves in the world because the first thing we do on Google Maps, for example, is to check if our house is there, as if to say "If there is, then I exist!". (Pietro Ruffo)

In 2015 Pietro Ruffo received a call from Maria Grazia Chiuri, at the time the Artistic Director of Maison Valentino for whom he created a scenography on the occasion of a Haute Couture fashion show. From here his collaboration with the world of high fashion will be destined to develop and will lead Pietro Ruffo to develop his well-known world of flowers and enchantment of Italian high fashion shows. The setting of the star-shaped Parisian amphitheater of the 2017-2018 Dior fashion show was created by Ruffo who frescoed the vault with a sky that inspired the same designer of the fashion house that the following year, always in collaboration with the artist Roman presented sculptural clothes in which the starry sky and the twelve signs of the zodiac were represented. A reenactment of the iconic masked ball "Le Bal Oriental" in which Christian Dior and Salvador Dalì designed their costumes for each other. Nature and luxury, public opinion and sustainability overlap once again in the work of Pietro Ruffo, "the artist of freedom".

Photos by http://www.pietroruffo.com/works/