Claudio Cerritelli: I look at your photographic research for the first time and I wonder what the origin of your vision is, especially what the process that accompanies the construction of the image may be. I see objects suspended in an imponderable spatiality, almost weightless shapes swinging in the void. What happens in your work process?

Mattia Ruggeri: Everything starts from traditional photography, from photos that could be made in the 1930s with the birth of color. My photography is conducted in astronomical technique, we are in an area where the eye does not return as well as photography, we need a camera so that the eye can perceive what is invisible. The exposure is very long and the work done during the exposure is to hold light sources in your hand as if they were stars. The law is that of the universe: what you see in the cosmos happens because there are stars that illuminate the matter in suspension.

C.C : How do we pass from the cosmic law to that of artistic creation that imposes specific times and spaces?

M.R : I have these small stars in my hands (torches and light sources of various sizes) and I slowly bring them closer to what I am portraying, during this operation the camera slowly impresses the film.

C.C : Is it therefore an artifice designed to be filmed?

M. R : Usually a photo of me is the result of everything I know together with everything I know how to do. There are real objects present, dear to me, which are illuminated slowly, until the final result.

What is able to amaze, that is, to ignite his little philosophy, is this slow movement that breaks the speed pact of traditional ‘solar’ photography, the characteristics of which no longer count in my photos. My mind is able to record and introject the technique to illuminate thanks to the recipes, it’s like playing music and if a spectator is present for the 3-4 hours I spend illuminating, finally his mind can know how the photo will be before seeing it developed.

C.C : In the text parallel to the image of a work I read the word “recipe", what does this term allude to?
M.R : My work process is just like a cooking dish. When I marry a color well with the right warmth of light, I realize how successful this or that chromatic adventure is. Probably, I started to take the recipe because having lost my teachers for some years, the mistakes were wandering around as if they were my teachers (of athletics): who by bringing the artist to the finish line of the finished work, hide in the final sprint his poorer performance. But everything going slow.
C.C : The long time that you exalt does not, however, subtract from the final image of the photograph that represents the instant in which the process ends. How do you experience this contradiction between the slowness of the process and the uniqueness that characterizes the moment of photography, the shot?

M.R : It is not really like that, it is a complex image that photography fixes, like the quantity of light after it has traveled.

It is like the light that hits your eyes after millions of years when you look at the cosmos. The final image is the result of all my mistakes, my time. Going slowly I can allow myself to make mistakes and mistakes are the best things to see. This is really a law of slowness.

C.C : What tools does the viewer have to enter the time of knowledge of the image you create through your unmistakable process, what possibility does he have of reading what your works show?

M.R : Well, as they say in theoretical physics, everyone sees the amount of depth depending on their evolution. What I can also observe as a spectator is the aspect of the suspension, what is illuminated with the laws of the sky, remains as if in flight, risen.

The stars are made by mapping the frosted glass of the optical bench with a map of the sky, star by star by pointing a light source at the lens at various distances, to recreate the exact magnitudes. On the other hand, the galaxies represented an insurmountable rock until I realized that the wood of the floor on which I was messing around had knots, in the sense that it is an archetype of the galaxies, precisely the departure of the branch, developing year by year, circle by circle it has the same shape as galaxies.

C.C : When did you understand that this technique was important?

Mr. Wall. But it wasn’t enough, they were three identical walls full of books, so it took me a long time to get to the camera and cover it, I was much, much slowerof a ray of light in reaches the lens. This type of loss occurs either to those who are under an avalanche or to astronauts.

C.C : What triggers the photographic operation, what is the moment of its implementation, what is the motive or the occasion that triggers this need?

M.R : I never photograph by chance, I photograph once a month, and in that photo I put what is happening to me, each work is an indication of the photographic need, in the suspended streets I follow. If I need bread, and I don’t have the money with me, I acquire it by taking a picture of it.

C.C : I see that you make a precise and certainly not casual use of the mirroring surface, what is the reason for the choice of Plexiglas, what function does this support have in your works?

M.R : It creates the “wet" effect, wet things are always more beautiful.

C.C : On the other hand, the way you provoke color, how you light it up, how you enhance its presence to its almost incandescent brightness is engaging on the imaginative level.

M.R : Yes, I help color a lot, everything happens a few centimeters from the lens, in that very short space where the light starts from my hands, touches objects and returns to the camera. In that interval, anything can still happen. This stems from a technical error, from a lack of attention to what the ‘photography manual’ says: never illuminate the lens with light sources: the stars. When a photograph is completed, its age relieves it from the author and submerges it with fashions and habits, lightly, like a dust, but the cleanliness of style and the inclination in the degree of its invention renew it from the inside.

C.C : The themes you face are many, for example they are linked to the constellations, as in the “Frutti della Mensa”.

M.R : I found in the southern hemisphere what is called the “constellation of the Mensa", the photo is a reference to the famous Caravaggesque “basket" (probably a kind of photo-graph too), which however is suspended. The table on which it rested has disappeared, or rather only a knot of its wood remains, transformed into the Magellanic cloud.

C.C : The self-portrait also emerges in the figure of the hanged.

M.R : It is a self-portrait built on the knowledge of tarot cards, it is an important symbolic threshold that indicates being tied to what one knows, and I am hanging in the dust. It is the deepest thing I know. Everyone does it, I mean the dust.

CC: it is therefore a cosmic threshold.

M.R : In fact, the image includes all the zodiac signs to symbolize the highest degree of knowledge in the perpetual secrets of the sky. Also present in the photograph is my sculpture ‘the Tree’, which stands on the sides of the threshold.

C.C : It could be called the threshold of being.

M.R : Threshold of my being in September 2007.

C.C : What is the meaning of the image of the blackboards present in many works?

M.R : There is a whole vein concerning blackboards, from which I had the first need to use photography, as drawing on the blackboards was not easy to give these drawings durability. With this choice I learned that the blackboard was a portion of the cosmos, that the camera had to go further and show things that are otherwise not seen.

C.C : And the hammer and the feather in the work that bears the title “Galileo’s Sofa" to which metaphor do they allude?

Mr. Galileo. In another work, Sedia dei Poeti (for me the best in the exhibition) the drawing on the blackboard has taken all the dust that I have not cleaned, obtaining the background. These blackboards are traveling along the dust and I find them at several years-dust with everything that lies behind the dust as quality: country dust, city dust, dust from any other place, even depending on the height at which the drawing stands, more or less coarse dust. Without photography, nothing would be seen.

C.C : So photography reveals the invisible.

M.R : Yes, photography works on the invisible, and for me this is a necessity of photography. Let it be clear that we are not in the digital artifice but in a manual operation that is grappling with the cosmos in all moments of life. We run into it when, for example, in the morning we wander in the dark looking for socks in the closet, all struggling with the deepest cosmos.

C.C : In your research there is a strong chromatic sensitivity, what is the difference between painting and photography?

M.R : There is a profound discourse that separates photography from painting, I don’t put in but take away, and in this the discourse is very similar to sculpture. In photography I take away what the object is able to reflect. Being able to remove and not ‘put on’ represents an absolute aristocracy.

C.C : It is a question of removing, therefore, to arrive at the absolute suspension of a non-place.

M.R : It is a suspension where I meet myself.

C.C : Everything is played on conjunctions that emerge from your life path, photography works on the moments of existence.

M.R : As a child I have always felt happy in the moments when the shutter of the camera was left open, now it is open for hours. When a work frightens me, I know that I will never be able to repeat it again, the work is successful.

C.C : In this sense you can be defined as a pure creator.

M.R : A source, in fact to say artist is a bit mannerist. The real problem is the force with which one collides, the contrast lies in the fact of creating. It is necessary to realize that there is no invention, that the work is the product of good steps taken, good behavior, well-kept balance.

CC: Among the specific characters of your photographs emerges the way of recording the movements of the sign, the automatisms of the gesture, the spontaneous paths of the lines, the light drawn by the dust, the floating of the chromatic shivers in the suspension of the cosmos with all the weight and the lightness of darkness. And then there is always the presence of objects that are evident symbolic means even if they are complex to decipher, such as shoes.
M.R : Shoes are very interesting, they are mindful of the shape of the foot but also of the head, habits and paths of the person who wore them. It is a multi-reality like the one described by the American physicist Richard Feynman when he said that there are many existing dimensions, but perceptible according to the evolution of the species that he looks at. The dimensions that escape us are wrapped around objects, ready to unfold as soon as the subject is able to perceive them. When old and used shoes percolate like interference from an evolutionary stage that we do not yet possess.