ARTE FIERA OBSERVATORY

Riccardo Baruzzi (b. Lugo, 1976) is a visual artist. His autobiography can be summed up as follows: “One day I went to my valley – the Ravenna Valley – where some friends organised lunches in the hunting and fishing huts. I was just a kid, but I clearly remember the table with a plastic tablecloths, the sun hot enough to fry the sliced salami, the landscape that was half nature and half industrial archaeology. I stared at a few curious details: a knotted coloured rope used as a pulley, broken bottles reused for other purposes. It all seemed tasteless, but in that poverty, in those coarse, practical choices, I perceived a form of beauty that moved me.”
For Art City 2021, Riccardo Baruzzi presented "Quadro sonoro (Bic Barchino)," curated by Pedro Rocha, at the Historical Theatre of Villa Aldrovandi-Mazzacorati.

Bologna is one long walk, from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, and you feel so protected that when you walk beyond one of the city’s gates you feel colder or hotter. Bologna is brick red. Is brick red closer to brown or to a form of the earth? It makes no difference: colour is undefinable, but it’s clear that Bologna isn’t clear and blue. If you walk for at least 20 minutes you’ll very probably meet someone you know (unless it’s Assumption Day or Christmas). Bologna is full of Madonnas on brick-red streets: you turn a corner and you find more red and more Madonnas, with some stranger making the sign of the cross; I once saw this big guy in an open military Jeep make the sign from the street, looking under the protective red portico at a dazzling work I had never seen before. Under the porticos you can hear the sound of footsteps (now a rarity due to smelly sneakers), and when I hear them I know exactly where they are, with the red of the day or the brown of the night. Under a portico you can glimpse frescos inside houses, above another portico; dream and keep going on the brick street. There’s so much red that in the right season the poplar leaves seem to reflect it. Could brick red be close to vermilion? In Bologna I heard a big concert in a secret place named after a strange saint, and it had nothing to do with the big guy in the Jeep.