ON THE LABYRINTH’S THRESHOLD

As part  of the activities to promote the work of Angelo Ruga (Turin 1930 - Clavesana 1999), the cultural association of the same name organizes in Albissola Marina the exhibition ON THE LABYRINTH’S THRESHOLD.  Angelo Ruga 1930 - 1999, it’s divided into three different locations: Circolo degli Artisti; Balestrini Centro Cultura Arte Contemporanea; Lavanderia,  a new cultural space, that will be inaugurated and open to the public for that occassion.

The Lavanderia  takes its name from the actual function this place had  in the historic center of Albissola Marina at that time,  when it was owned by Angelo Ruga’s wife, Biagina Baccani Ruga, who left it as an inheritance to  the Cultural Association of which she was the creator and co-founder in 2009. The street of Albissola Marina where La Lavanderia is located - Via Stefano Grosso - is enriched with a new cultural space, which is added to the Galleria il Bostrico, Balestrini Centro Cultura Arte Contemporanea and Fornace Alba Docilia.

The exhibition and the Lavanderia will be inaugurated Saturday, November 16 with a conference at 17:00, at Muda Exhibition Center, in via dell'Oratorio 2, in which will take part the Deputy Mayor of Albissola Marina Nicoletta Negro, the Mayor of Clavesana Luigi Gallo, the President of the Accademia Albertina of Turin,  Paola Gribaudo, the President of the Association Ruga Mauro Baracco, the curator of the exhibition Luca Bochicchio, the art critics Sandro Ricaldone and Giovanni Gobbi. Afterwards, from 18:30 it will be possible to visit the three venues of the exhibition.
On this occasion, the editorial series of the "Quaderni della Lavanderia" will be launched, a series of periodical publications edited by the Ruga Association and dedicated to the deepening of contemporary art and culture.
The exhibition ON THE LABYRINTH’S THRESHOLD. Angelo Ruga 1930-1999, curated by Luca Bochicchio and organized by Mauro Baracco and Giulia Gaggero of the Cultural Association Angelo Ruga, is part of a study course aimed at  re-evaluating  in a critical and historiographical manner, the work of Angelo Ruga.

In the Circolo degli Artisti section, will be exhibited works in ceramics, many of which brand new  or not known.  At  Balestrini Centro  Cultura Arte  Contemporanea, the exhibition will focus on the fantastic characters researched by Ruga during the mature phase of his career (harlequins, scarecrows, etc.). Finally, the spaces of the new Lavanderia,  will be dedicated to landscape painting, perhaps the most famous of Ruga and yet still characterized by large unexplored and unknown areas.

After studying at the artistic high school and the Accademia Albertina in Turin, in 1954, Ruga moved for a few years, to Albisola (Savona), where he came into contact with groups of the international avant-garde gathered there. He related in particular with Asger Jorn (1914-1973), who painted a portrait of Ruga, preserved as today, at  the Jorn Museum of Silkeborg (Denmark).

The influence of abstract expressionism and european informal in him is, however, mitigated by a personal interpretation of the construction of the image, through a sign and a spatial dimension in which one can find surprising assonances with Japanese painting. Moving to the hill of Mongreno, in Turin, he made a first original cycle of city views,  where macroscopic presence of insects were grafted. While continuing to visit Albisola, where he dedicates himself with excellent results also to ceramic sculpture, an authentic turning point takes place with the definitive transfer to Clavesana (Cuneo), in the Langhe. Here Ruga gives life to his most important pictorial cycles, the result of solitary reflections that develops while immerse in the hills, alternating poetic verses sketches, drawings and oil paintings, even of considerable size, and working sporadically on assemblage and ceramic sculptures.

While revealing tangences to the european informal of surrealist derivation, to historical expressionism, to stylistic canons typical of Japanese aesthetics, as well as closer synthetic research on the Italian landscape - such as, for example, that of Tullio Pericoli (1936) - Ruga’s art is characterized by a strong expressive autonomy, unmistakably attributable to the author. A sign with strong graphic power serves both to define primary figures, almost ancestral (mothers, girls, totems, animals, vineyards), and to give a comprehensive, abstract and symbolic view of the landscape, understood in its cosmic dimension of earth and nature.

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