RENATO RANALDI		Biography
parusie – repertorio del piccolo disegno		Catalogs
curated by BRUNO CORA’
19 February – 22 April 2005

With a retrospective of small drawings dating from the Sixties to the present day, Galleria Il Ponte presented a personal show dedicated to the artist Renato Ranaldi.
The exhibition was born almost to accompany the imposing volume curated by Bruno Corà, in which the development of Ranaldi’s work may be observed through a corpus of small drawings which span forty years, from the Sixties to the present day.
The complex overlapping of signs in the almost 800 reproductions which make up the book are reflected faithfully in the way the show is set up, with the pieces covering practically all the available space on the walls.
«[…]The hundreds of small drawings collected in the Breviary for Neutral Days often conceal grand dreams, unsettling apparitions, solitary drifts.  Rinaldi’s range of imagination often journeys into latitudes from which, on the way back, the drawing suggesting the outlines and traces lacks any restful compensation for itself and provides, instead, amazement to the eyes of others.  These are losses of way in which he puts himself at risk,  necessary to revelatory recoveries of a possible way out of the all-encompassing fog.  What we see in these “micro-events” is the resonant echo from inner abysses fathomed from poetic self-reflection.  The vis signativa descends like a drill into the bowels of the unknown by virtue of the penetrating innocence of dreams.  What surfaces ignores every rational principle or certainty, exhibiting passports of happenstance.  Contrary to the shiny slime of a snail, a drawing winds along by co-penetrating paper and becoming, at the same time, an obscure destiny and haruspex.   As soon as the markings irrigate that white desert of the paper sheet, the images welling out establish something of an arcane independence in that vanitas, which exists only in the way they are tangled and delineated, without any rhetorical promise of coherence. 
An unreality whose flagrant presence in each and everyone’s life cannot be ignored blossoms in these drawings:  the architectures, the places, the emblems of the urban world, the objects, phenomena, the spatial entities, the phantasmically suggestive figures, the symbols, the monads, the atmospheric-environmental grids, the hallucinations, the wonders, the prosaic device of daily reality made paradoxical and exaggerated to the point of mutually sharing and dissolving the tragic and comical conditions of existence; everything becomes recognizable and unexpected at the same time, as if a strange and tyrannical ars combinatoria had clumsily but perversely joined and orchestrated it all.[…]». (Taken from the text in the catalogue by Bruno Corà, Parusie – Repertorio del piccolo disegno).