In a crystalline moment, I recognized Pietro Ruffo as the artist I'd longed to work with. I'd met him on another project and was immediately struck by his professional yet kind, empathetic approach, as soft as the tone of his voice. Some time later, we began a dialogue for this production, and each time he confirmed that sense of welcoming softness, of affectionate virtues without losing focus on every technical detail, with a professional concentration I'd seen as a child in the masters who gravitated toward us in the print shop.

Starting October 21st, with the participation of three students from the two-year master's program at the School of Graphic Arts and a former student from the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, the first large-scale production of 2RCABAU was completed. Every gesture, every movement seemed like a Matisse-esque dance between spontaneity and professionalism, an artisanal symposium that transformed the workspace into a chamber of wonders, an ideal place for altruistic exchanges and generous actions. During those days, a unique core was formed, a small universe where skills and creativity merged, where everyone found their own rhythm without ever overwhelming others.

The perception of group work becomes a vivid sense of family bonding, a sort of human constellation at whose center I see the work in progress, like a great temporary mother who generates relationships and builds emotional identities along the way. An ancestral bond that connects each of us with the others involved, generating fruits that nourish art and its impact on real affections.

Alongside us is Gianluca Marziani, who directs the curatorial instruments of a polyphonic and coherent orchestra, characterized by slow processes and structured visions, by ancient memories and dynamic innovations, along feelings of belonging that together we transform into a harmony of forms and substances.

This same approach guides us in our new adventure in Urbino: today Gianluca works with me on curatorial projects, and together we weave stories in which the artwork is an aesthetic and emotional driving force, broadening the emotional geography of our journeys.

Now, as the first project comes to a close, the memory of a unique experience remains, one of living art, of palpable friendship, of an energy that seemed to breathe with the printed pages. A moment when creativity found its purest space, and collaboration transformed into timeless poetry. With the promise that this is only the beginning of a long family journey.

Birth of an evolution 

Gianluca Marziani

LThe creation of an author's print is a complex and meticulous matter, true graphic entropy  where the alchemy of differences materializes in the harmonious balance of execution techniques. For 2RC, this methodology is a deeply rooted family mantra, an empathic journey alongside the artist, participating in the aesthetic ritual of unity within multiplicity. It is a dialectical process between conceptual writing and the technical direction of artisanal weights, where the synergy metabolizes pictorial needs, the potential of graphic skills, the qualities of materials, and, last but not least, the form of a poetic object that condenses thematic values ​​and conceptual keys.

December 2025: Pietro Ruffo opens the new 2RC journey with a window onto the wonders of the Earth, a square of compositional synthesis where scientific knowledge captures the dynamic memory of the planet. The reference cartography, dated 1893, is titled "Nature in Descending Regions" and is signed by Levi Walter Yaggy: it is a cross-section of the Earth with landscapes, natural elements and marine biology, a print that in the last century was used for educational purposes and which, today, takes on the value of a testimonial of a geological dynamism in which anthropology, a discipline that reveals the Earth's karmic cycle, becomes  moral archaeography of incessant change. 

Ruffo brings narrative energy to the geological weight of life, reflecting on the complexity of Nature, investigating the fusional bond between civilization and landscape, modeling clusters that overlap semantic elements in a time machine of quantum reporting on atoms and cells. His is the world-centric vertigo of a broad-spectrum gaze, the ethical virtue of a luminous and metaphysical reasoning, the philosophical close-up that transforms the work into a  yogic resonance, an energetic atman that escapes the centrality of perspective to awaken in the multiplication of propulsive centers. 

Le Monde Avant la Création de L'Homme It is presented in a 95x95 cm format, a dimension that Simona Rossi considers the perfected equation of the graphic unicum as well as a necessary thread of continuity with the "Presenze Grafiche" project, created in 1971 by Valter Rossi, who glimpsed in the square the alchemical aura of ideal space. For Ruffo, the square was a less typical format, as he loved the horizontal or circular development of his work, yet the print floats steadily in this Euclidean quadrature that enhances the paradigmatic synthesis of his iconography, condensing the partial geometry of the aerial eye onto terrestrial features. The result brings us different atmospheric moments: landscapes and maps, marine animals and plant forms, ink and ballpoint pen, impressions and superimpositions, concluding with the intense wave of that definitive black, the sign that traverses space and time as if it were a fossil imprint where everything is condensed, a kind of compressed time machine that can be unrolled in every direction.

That wavy slap of black comes from a shell, that is, the geological object that preserves fossil memories of very long time, a sort of architectural recorder in which the ergonomic shape becomes a habitable part of the generating subject, remaining a resistant casing, a biological capsule of a protective system that reminds us of the natural order of our beloved Earth. 

The primeval forest evoked by the title encompasses the history of the planet before humans, a long vegetal period in which the cell cycle flowed without anyone contemplating its sublime spectacle. In such a wild world, devoid of direct witnesses, control fell to the ecstatic resilience of the elements, a biological orchestra where everything participated in the symphony of pure cyclical existence. Fifty million years ago, let's not forget, the Earth was covered in a tropical forest, an impenetrable habitat that Ruffo seems to hear as if it were the echo of a sound archaeology, the electrical trace that the ballpoint ink carries in its photosynthetic fibrillation. It is the progressive resonance of immense time on the scale of manual gesture, a still-wet waste with its blue sap that reaches us, in the graphic ways of a microstar in the paper firmament, revealing temporal mismatches and emotional edges that trace the essential nature of our origins. 

An encyclopedic system of analysis guides Ruffo's approach to the project. The painting becomes the synthesis of a gradual and sublimated knowledge, the collage and the clippings embody the visual magic that invents an otherwise impossible account. Thus, unbridgeable distances converge, processes with their physical conditions emerge, millennia-old space-time overlaps under a demiurgic climate that makes the dialogue between micro and macro plausible. Pietro Ruffo seems like a talented student of James Lovelock, the philosopher who gave a name to the planet—Gaia—and who revealed the macrobiology of this immense living body, a sentient being acting on principles of functional action and reaction, similar to a human but on the grand scale of geological extension. Ruffo's various cycles tell us Gaia's stories through the luminous alchemy of the visual apparatus, revealing the different phases of her gigantic life, the various aspects of her climate, the multiple paths of her biological knowledge, observing the "garments" Gaia wears across oceans and continents, the ways she "makes up" her powerful body, the ways she behaves to activate the right strategies of resilience. 

Let us conclude our journey with our pupils focused on the square print, on that liquid wonder that passes through the invisible and restores to us the hidden order of the gods, our radiant cosmic smallness but also the power of images that transcribe parts of the world, enabling memory to resonate like the sound of happy stars.

Thanks Peter!