Students of St Stephen's School in Rome recently visited Pietro Ruffo's exhibition L’Ultimo Meraviglioso Minuto at Palazzo delle Esposizioni.

The students were accompanied by their art teachers Lisa Fedich and Samantha Berman. The visit was organised by publisher Domitilla Sartogo of DRAGO who produced the catalogue of the exhibition.

Here two of the students recount their experience of the exhibition and their illuminating encounter with the artist.

Gaia - 11th grade

Pietro Ruffo mesmerized his audience with superimpositions and unconventional installations showcasing his work at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. His art revolves around the environment, human forms, and geographical maps, all of which reveal his awareness and perception of his place in the world and work ethic.

Through his work and his scrupulous research for images of the world, Ruffo developed a profound conception of art that combines social, ethical, and philosophical perspectives, some of which originated from his training as an architect.

Starting from the first room, I was impressed. Ruffo began to present. His eyes sparked, and his hands gesticulated fervently as he tried to explain to his audience the adrenaline and inspiration behind each piece of art.

Pietro Ruffo uses natural landscapes like the Grand Canyon, forests, and coral reefs, to highlight often overlooked and subtle details of these places. To achieve his art and concepts, he carves and cuts paper to create multiple layers supported by pins, forming 3D images; he also experiments with more typical art mediums, such as pencil and paintbrush.

Essentially, Ruffo utilizes various materials to ensure that details are clear and his audience can understand the implications of nature and human interference.

The penultimate room demanded more interpretation.

Personally, I was initially unconvinced about the theme of his art, but as he guided us through his ideas, I began to see the scope of his pieces.

We humans have come to understand that our actions are disrupting nature and its ecosystems, making our planet a dangerous place – this is true, but Ruffo reminds us we must not undermine our efforts.

The human experience, illustrated by a skull adorned with patches of colorful acrylics, has demonstrated remarkable and wondrous endeavors in praising the beauty of our world while enriching it with monumental tributes as civilizations have risen and fallen through the centuries, leaving an indelible trace behind made of knowledge, philosophy, and art.

The last room struck me the most; it delved into his personal environment and thought processes.

What he did was brilliant: he transferred notes from his architectural studies onto a single canvas.

The final result was a combination of site plans and maps of Rome interspersed with drawings and annotations.

He shared that his notes alone were enough to constitute art, requiring no further elaboration or conclusive binding.

His art exposes his unfiltered ideas, not just one final result.

This was provoking for me.

In school and outside, I’m told to draw conclusions and establish my standpoint, but perhaps I’d prefer to follow Ruffo's example and value the process or means more than the end product. The end product can sometimes conceal the beauty of the process and the development of ideas in between.

By Ziyan - 10th grade

The exhibition of Pietro Ruffo in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni was a true enlightenment to me.

The artworks were an exploration of humanity in the display of human ingenuity throughout evolution. It is a constant reminder to us of our origins and heritage of all human kinds.

I was honoured to experience this marvelous travel in the past with my school St. Stephen’s and with the artist Pietro Ruffo guiding us through his artworks and giving us a detailed talk of his inspirations and significance.

The most captivating piece of artwork, I believe, is “Le Monde Avant La Création de l’Homme”. As we entered the room, we were intrigued by the Great Canyon in front of us. The various cut outs of sea shells from the canvas reveal the antique past before the creation of humans. Both the canyon and the shells symbolize the product of millennium history.

I looked around the room and I noticed the huge curtains imprinted with leaf drawings in blue ink. These blue curtains surrounding the room drowns everything in its cover, allowing the public to immerse in the era where no living things have set foot on Earth yet, where our planet was covered by immense ocean water.

In the visit, the artist, Pietro Ruffo himself, invites us to a totally separate world. As we followed him passing by the other side of the Great Canyon, we entered a world full of color. This is the next stage of evolution, the emergence of organisms on Earth. Circular stations of different sizes and heights present a colorful forest of cut out papers. From the top, I saw a three dimensional illusion of nailed papers placed in layers, some pieces upwards, some pieces downwards.

They look like spots of algae on the water surface. But when I kneeled down and looked through the side of the work as the artist showed us, I found a forest of the past. Through the protective glass of the art piece, I saw wooden tree trunks made of metallic needles that nailed the papers, and the watercolors became the lively leaves of the trees.

Pietro Ruffo influenced and inspired me in a new world of imagination and creativity.