Pietro Ruffo

In intricate drawings, watercolors, installations, and digital works, Pietro Ruffo examines political ideologies, social and ethical issues, and the nature of human freedom. Ruffo’s subjects include the American moral and political philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick; his series “The Political Gymnasium” consists of nine finely detailed pencil drawings appropriated from 19th-century satirical prints with stenciled letters from Nozick’s texts cut out and superimposed on top, creating a tension between the two. In 2005, Ruffo travelled to Beslan, Russia, to work as an art therapist with children who survived the massacre at their local school by Chechen rebels, an experience that inspired a large-scale illustration, Beslan doppia mappatura (Beslan Double Mapping) (2006), of the destroyed classrooms and surviving children. More recently, he has produced works in which he configures fragments of paper and maps into complex arrangements that refer to the political ideals of the recent Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East.