Ruco was born in Rome in 1991 and he has been drawing since he can remember. During high school, he began to take an interest in the world of tattooing and approached thisjob as soon as he finished school. Ruco began tattooing in 2012 in Florence, while studying Art Printing Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts and he began receiving invitations as a guest in several studios around the world: Mexico, Israel, Honk Hong... His figurative style is the result of numerous influences from the most different fields. The main thread is related to the taste for the grotesque. Passionate about masks, he made them a source of research, producing them by hand. In addition to his own tattoo studio in the heart of Rome, Ruco pursues his other passions in a small private studio where he finds his space to create masks and costumes, model clay, paint, and so on. In 2018 Ruco brought out the research project related to the theme of the tattoo ritual "STILLIFE BRÜCKE" in collaboration with Servadio: 4-handed sessions in which the surrounding environment becomes the subject of the tattoo, whether it is a predefined and static composition or a changing and dynamic situation. In this way, the subject is not previously decided nor born from the imagination of the artists but represents what you have in front of your eyes during the ritual. Ph. Credits: Shyla Nicodemi

Signed and numbered by the artist.

“My intent is to represent a mere portrait of the ‘iniquity and ambiguity of the human being.’ The inspiration came from the reading of the transcription of wall engravings that Fernando Oreste Nannetti made in the courtyard of the psychiatric hospital in Volterra.” Ruco

The screen print “L’Elemento Umano s’Allunga e si Accorcia,” created within the Varsi Lab in collaboration with 56Fili, is in fact named after one of the lines left by Nannetti, part of a graffiti cycle considered a masterpiece of Art Brut.

The cycle was organized as a kind of story in images later collected in a photographic volume that Antonio Tabucchi describes as follows:

“A book that contains, in the distortion of madness, what many books in the history of men contain: cosmogonies, wars, mysteries, sorrows, joy, religiosity, fear, love and death.”

Ruco, using his typical grotesque style, impersonates human instincts that take shape in the expressiveness of the mask.

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