Del disegno e del deserto rosso

After some series of works focused on the deconstruction of drawing and sound, Riccardo Baruzzi turns to autobiographical narrations, revealing the forms and panorama of his youth. “Del disegno e del deserto rosso” reconstructs the humble architecture and unconscious forms of art that exist in the quiet panorama of the lagoon of Ravenna, punctuated by capanni. Fragile shacks of wood and reeds, these huts have been decorated by hunters and fishermen in an attempt to while away the hours of repose or waiting.

The bilancione or padellone is a fishing net fastened to support structures by means of cables and pulleys; it is lowered and raised with ropes and winches. The “Bilancione” of Riccardo Baruzzi supports a drawing interchangeable with other drawings kept in a box that is the complement to the work. Net, font, wellhead, altar, vessel: the lightness of the “Bilancione” suggests ancient rituals of offering, nourishment and fishing.

In “Silvia” the painting roams the pine forest, transported by the backpack of a young woman; the work reveals how the artist’s research into the discovery of new ‘fragile displays’ for painting and drawing began. Both the works announce the death of the wall and of the hieratic distance of paper, canvas and stretcher: the painting and drawing are touched, transported, moved, experienced in proximity.

A marine Harlequin is the sentinel, the genius loci, of “Del disegno e del deserto rosso”. The young fisherman looks at a forest of metal reeds: these are sculptural works, laminated tubes on which the artist has forged a pictorial aesthetic, bending the humble materials of the slums and shanties towards an unexpected romanticism. Some of the reeds are activated by mini-vibrators that strike the metal, producing the metaphysical sounds of the Ravenna-based industrial factories portrayed by the director Michelangelo Antonioni.

Vibration returns in “Acustê dri dri”: the artist juxtaposes the canvas of a painting and the surface of a drum. A humble polyphony narrates the archaic and ritual proximity between sound and painting. The sound sinks on the wall; the ‘audiophile paintings’ come from Riccardo Baruzzi’s research on the material nature and display of sound-absorbing structures in listening rooms. These panels are inserted in open compositions, in which the bare structure of the stretcher contains many of the materials dear to the artist, including MDF, woodboard and dried flowers.