The nostalgia for the infinite that Mattia Ruggeri must have grasped since he was a child, has since 2004 found a visionary ability that manages to withstand the stress of traditional photography, indeed it is enhanced in this close dialogue. It happens that the two opposites, sculpture and photography, or those that appear to be such, find themselves on the plane of a projection towards the unlimited, the impossible.
Ruggeri portrays himself in his images of him with his eyes closed: is he sleeping, dreaming or just pretending? We are not given to know exactly. What is certain is that strange stories happen around him. Illuminated cherry trees that seem to be on fire, wardrobes and chests that reveal a belly so obese as to contain the universe, trees that look like cathedrals and stars, many stars: the repertoire of wonders could stop here, but it goes on. There is even a Time Office, for those who are familiar with bureaucracy. But it is clear that the aforementioned nostalgia feeds on paradoxes and some alchemy.
Indeed, it feels like entering an astrology textbook written by a shy cosmologist or a Phil Dick-like interpretation of Artemidorus’s “Book of Dreams".
It is dark and yet you can see it. But it is good to look at this inventory of luminous bodies that do not always shine, it is good because you feel like Alice through the mirror: the Pendu suggests something to us, a tarot life, a phallus, an infamy, an error (always juvenile) or a blind fate that rages against the innocent. The world is going upside down in these parts and even if we know that in the Cosmos directions don’t count, we somehow find ourselves dealing not only with prodigies, but also with reversals of meaning that not even the most daring of limericks might be able to rhyme. Up, down, left and right are canceled, we shake a crazed joystick that doesn’t respond to our commands.
Mattia Ruggeri, photographer and sculptor like Brancusi, is able to stage his imagination as if it were ours. He also understands that the unconscious is baroque and that he cannot do without excesses, because it is these that he feeds on. Moreover, it accompanies the photos of him, all taken with the optical bench, with texts in which his handwriting is added to the cosmological chaos, which is saying something. Does he really write like that or does he pretend? This too is a meaningless question because beyond the mirror everything is possible, because nothing has an explanation. Asking questions only means increasing the number of responses waiting to be archived. And Ruggeri has the solemn and staid air of someone who answers a question with another question, but at the same time he reassures that an answer, if it is not certain, will certainly be probable: we must be satisfied with this. But there is no Kafka hidden under his closed eyelids. Maybe some extravagance written by a poet on vacation or the clouds reflecting in a metallic and stellar sky. There is the flow of the stars and there are the tides of time, the lies of beauty and the enticements of reason. It is not cheap.
Mattia Ruggeri thinks when he looks and when he closes his eyes he really does it, to rest from dreams.
Valerio Dehò
