Carmine Di Ruggiero ^©  

(1934)

Provenance:
Dargut e Milena Kemali Collection

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Carmine Di Ruggiero, born in 1934 in Naples, trained with Emilio Notte at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, making his debut in the early 1950s with still lifes inspired by Braque and Picasso. From research conducted in the wake of the post-cubist tradition, at the end of the 1950s, he arrived at a personal adherence to the informal material which translates into a thickening of the chromatic material spread through a fast gesture which, although expressed with "a lava fury of convulsive and crowded brushstrokes” (Vergine 1963), does not succeed in dissolving the figurative nucleus traceable in the same titles. At the beginning of the 1960s, a slowdown in the compositional rhythm, which became more thoughtful, and a lowering and cooling of the chromatic range, now given in broad strokes on large intersecting surfaces, marked his definitive detachment from the experience of the informal . Starting from the Seventies, when with Barisani, Tatafiore, De Tora, Riccini, Testa and Trapani he founded the Geometria e Ricerca group, active from 1976 to 1980, Di Ruggiero recovered the abstractionist tradition of the M.A.C. and returns to the canvas support on which he paints rigorous geometric compositions of triangles in pure, bright colours. From the 90s to today, the evolution of his research towards a renewed neo-Dada spirit has produced a series of works in which objects linked to artistic practice or the concept of time, such as the hourglass, are glued onto the painted canvas of a dazzling white and with the body of chalk.

(From the artist's biography by Maria Confalone)