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Ruggero Maggi
- TRUER THAT NATURE
- Ruggero Maggi is defined as an outsider and, maybe this best describes how he operates on the margins of accepted forms.
- Since the early seventies, Ruggero Maggi has beeen researching and developing in an apparently eclectic manner but, in fact, wholly supported by an inner logic and by a vision of perfect and total continuity.
- Ruggero Maggi's work is closely associated with language.
- His individual creations are derived from a research into language based on an elementary and primary dialectic. His language combines "higt-tech" elements with primary and elementary materials: the primitive and the sophisticated interrelated.
- Cement, wood, pictures, holograms, neon lamps, paintings, sculptures, installations, performances. Ruggero Maggi's work is connected with an ethical approach to language.
- His universe is the world of morality. The basis of his linguistic activity is the world of the philosophy of action; although to speak of the artist as a moral being does not mean he is a moralist. Ruggero's morality is the morality of human action.
- His linguistic approach.to the artistic world of morality implies a generous vision of Man - perhaps, even speak a humanistic approach.
- Nowadays, to speak of the artist as a humanist in a highly industrial society and through the analytic paradigm of the post-modern condition, is to suggest a quite different meaning from that of scholastic tradition. Ruggero Maggi's humanism is directly related to the image and measure of his own humanity. It's not by chance that from Hiroshima to the Amazon, the artist has coped with the innermost destiny of Man, his role and his function on our planet. Maggi's work is an everlasting struggle against human injustice. His structural dimension is represented by the truth.
- The artist, at the beginning of his commitment, accepts a fundamental challenge: the revolution of the Truth!
- Truth is the fundamental criterion of Maggi's aesthetics. Truth substitutes beauty, the concept of beauty of the tradtional canons of art. Substituting truth for beauty implies a revolutionary idea of truth, and the artist's truth certainly is not the product of the inescapable observations of evidence. Maggi's truth is a system of appearances. If truth is formed by appearances, this true reality cannot be represented. In fact, the whole of Maggi's work is a display of truth and not a representation.
- The passage from representation to display of truth informs the rhythm and essential structure of language.
The display of truth in reality is not perceived by the Man if this truth is limited to his own being. In order to get the aesthetical truth, to get the fundamental criterion of the artistic language it is necessary to present it as truer than Nature. And it is exactly in this expressive addition where lies the key for reading Maggi's art. To express truth as truer than Nature means to engage oneself to give to human action its intrinsic dynamics of moral motivation. The more truth is perceived as such, the more we are in the universe of an active aesthetics, an operational aesthetics, capable of creating the elements of an harmonic sensibility. Right this sense of truth finds its basis in the great question of the moment, in the great challenge to taste and sensibility. We are in a post-industrial society, and therefore in a society which has not gone beyond the industrial stage, but is wholly saturated with machines. In this society it becomes necessary to re-create the relationship between man and machine, and today this machine is the computer. To re-create this relationship implies the creation of right and true conditions of a dialogue between two types of intelligence: artificial and human.And it's in the core of this dialogue that Ruggero Maggi's linguistic research is inserted. This is the reason why his research is true, and truer than Nature. Without this supplement of soul, itself would be no longer credible. Pierre Restany
