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ART DIRECTOR

MARIA GABRIELLA DAMIANI

MASSIMO RUIU – The verse of lead, the colour of ash

10th May – 6th June 2025

MASSIMO RUIU

the verse of lead, the colour of ash

By Ilaria Caravaglio

10th May – 6th June 2025

View the poster

Orizzonti Arte Contemporanea

Piazzetta Cattedrale, Historical Centre, Ostuni

The exhibition is configured as a poetic and immersive journey that intertwines memory, absence and stratified levels of understanding. The installation creates a dialogue between two distinct but complementary cycles: the Lead cycle, composed of works made with hunting pellets and metallic materials, and the Ash cycle, consisting of enamelled glass reliquaries containing ashes of books. Both series of works address the tension between presence and disappearance, matter and idea, in a continuous confrontation between violence and memory, sacredness and loss.

Ruiu is a Puglian artist born in 1961 and based in Rome. He is known for his conceptual and interdisciplinary research, aimed at exploring themes linked to the most intimate and profound human need, using a variety of techniques and languages, including installations, drawings, photography and video. Over the years, he has developed a dialogue/poetics that is based on the strength of the non-visible, of absence as an active presence.

From the “black holes (buchi neri)” of Absolute Shadows (Ombre Assolute) to the “Books of Ashes (libri di cenere)”, Ruiu constructs an aesthetic language that rejects the excess of contemporary images to focus on the “non”, on the essential.

In the Lead cycle, works such as “The verse of lead (Il verso del piombo)” (2021 and 2023) stand out, in which enamelled iron plates are sprinkled with hunting pellets that form silhouettes of birds, evoking a threatened beauty, frozen in an instant of suspended aggression. In “War Dove brood a cannon ball (La colomba della guerra cova una palla di cannone)” (2025), one of the most recent productions and exhibited for the first time, the bitter irony of the title is embodied in the use of resin and lead, symbols of fragility and heaviness.

Other works such as “Saturn (Saturno)” (2024) and “Low Altitude (A bassa quota)” (2025), made with oil and lead on canvas or board, maintain a pictorial lightness of surface that contrasts with the density of the material, offering a visual and conceptual contrast that refers to myth and immanence.

The Ashes cycle, on the other hand, proposes a more intimate and lyrical reflection on cultural memory. Works such as “The poet’s rest (Il riposo del poeta)” (1998), which contains the ashes of the book Cuttlefish bones (Ossi di seppia) by Montale, or “The memories of Adriano (Le memorie di Adriano)” (1998), dedicated to the masterpiece by Marguerite Yourcenar, are true secular altars, on which burnt knowledge becomes a symbol of the transitory nature of knowledge.
The use of enameled glass gives them a sacred, but also precarious dimension, as if every relic could shatter under the weight of time.
The same sense of sacredness that exudes from “The smoke man (L’uomo di fumo)” (1998), in which smoke, an ephemeral and changeable element, becomes a medium that, used on paper, recalls the impermanence of life, mystery, change, full of philosophical as well as spiritual value.

The exhibition unfolds in a measured installation, in which the intimacy of the Project Room encourages a direct and meditative relationship with the works.
The arrangement of the installations stimulates a slow, almost liturgical movement, which invites the public not only to look, but to become the custodian of the silence and contemplation that the works require.

The works on display inevitably provoke a reflection on the value of memory, on the violence inherent in our nature and on the fragility of knowledge, elements that have always characterized the artist’s research.

The verse of lead, the colour of ash represents a significant stage in the path of Massimo Ruiu, who confirms himself as one of the most intense and coherent voices in the contemporary Italian artistic panorama. The exhibition is a poetic and political act at the same time, a silent and powerful denunciation of the violence inherent in everyday gestures and the fragility of knowledge, destined to dissolve like smoke or to fall like lead.

Biography

Born in S. Severo (FG) in 1961, he graduated in Contemporary Art History in 1989 and has been carrying out his artistic and exhibition activity since 1984.
His artistic research has, as its constant, a poetic tension that focuses on a series of themes linked to the most intimate and profound human needs.
These contents are substantiated, from time to time and in relation to the contexts, in works created through the use of diversified techniques and languages: installations, slide projections, videos, video installations, drawings, photography.
Massimo Ruiu currently lives and works in Rome.

Massimo Ruiu

the verse of lead, the colour of ash

By Ilaria Caravaglio

10th May – 6th June 2025

Visiting hours:

Monday to Saturday 10.30am – 2.30pm / 4.30pm – 6.30pm

Sunday morning only

GALLERIA ORIZZONTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA

Piazzetta Cattedrale (centro storico) 72017 Ostuni (Br)

Tel. 0831.335373 – Cell. 348.8032506

info@orizzontiarte.itwww.orizzontiarte.it

F: Orizzontiartecontemporanea

Communication Manager

Amalia Di Lanno

www.amaliadilanno.cominfo@amaliadilanno.com

GALLERY

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