Biography
Ruggiero Bignardi was born in December 1971 in Salerno; he spent his childhood in his father's house overlooking the wide gulf of Salerno and Paris where he spent the summers with his mother's grandparents. The journey becomes, already in youth, not a reason to evade, to escape, but meeting with different realities, urging to look "images" the world is made up of.
He studied in Salerno at the Institute of Art where he assiduously courses designed Figure and Photography, graduating in 1989. His real interest is, from the age of thirteen, to the design, where the figures are embedded in the landscape, then re-oriented with a firm determination to the study of human figures and, in particular, to the portrait. The linguistic references are at the great era of Impressionism which makes breakthrough in the imagination of the young artist; they will not be the rounded figures of Renoir, nor the restless women of Monet to hit his attention: what really catches his attention are the faces, the bodies, movements of the light Degas draws from the scene of a Paris invaded by modernity, transcribing the exciting areas of what will be “la Ville Lumiére” with the stroke of the pastel. These are the atmospheres Ruggiero Bignardi translates, since 1998, in current languages, with the undefined lights of the contemporary places. For this he returned to Paris where he studied live the works of the renowned artist at the Musée d'Orsay, going back and forth with the Centre Pompidou, admiring the contemporary collections and in particular the teachers of the informal French artist.
"Pastel - says the artist - is one of the techniques that requires greater contact with the instrument and the matter: it seems that the color arises naturally from the fingers, by his gestures, in short, a repetition of the fluid operation of the soul that it is typical of the immediate post-war painters. It creates a report hand- matter, which is comparable only to the relationship that the hand of the sculptor has with the clay he shapes, the dancer has with his body, the musician has with the notes”.
