Andrea Ruffoni’s House-Museum and Atelier

The House-Museum, the atelier and the private garden of the artist Andrea Ruffoni (1925-1990), accessible to the public since 2016, are run by a recently established Foundation, which keeps them open during the summer months. After spending long study periods abroad, where he had become familiar with all the main contemporary art trends, between Outsider Art and Informalism, in 1976 Ruffoni definitely returned to the island, where he developed an original technique of burning and melting plastic materials on a metal mesh, also using hardeners and sand finishes, iron oxides, coal tar and so on, to incorporate within the achromatic magma whole human figures or fragments of everyday objects and other evidence of life, in a dramatic and refined expression of complaint, intense piety and nostalgia of the anthropic and island landscape, which was disappearing. An important exhibition and a monography on his work were presented in 2007 by the Museo del Paesaggio of Verbania.