Portico e San Benedetto is a series of inclusions starting from its name. The last bastion of Romagna to the south, where the pronunciation of the S is still a point of pride, the town was for a long time also the land of the Florentine Portinari family of Dante’s Beatrice. One municipality, but three villages; it only just reaches 700 inhabitants, but is also home to an Italian school for foreigners since 1989. The widespread intervention by Rudi Ninov develops precisely on the curious contrasts of a city that seems to have made an identity trait out of diversity and hospitality.
Inside the small Oratorio by the bridge, a first ceramic installation is in dialogue with the reproduction of the Visitation of Carmignano by Pontormo, taking up the sculptural impetus of the drapes, as excessive as the color palette, elements of intensity and dynamism which can be found in Ninov’s work. The library in via Roma hosts a second ceramic installation: two sculptures which are both an invitation and a gift, will involve visitors firsthand. Finally, at the Portinari Tower, a series of canvases on the bare walls of the ancient donjon of the fort, accompanies the ascent to the panoramic view up to the Ponte della Maestà, thus closing the circuit of the visit.

The interest of Rudi Ninov (Teteven, 1992) in early animated films and their cinematic mechanism is fundamental to his work. In contrast to the weightlessness and graphic power of the two-dimensional work of his canvases, his sculptures present a tactility and a material multiplicity of tensions, surface textures and colors, which like crazy codes refer to different semantic spheres. Graduated from Goldsmith College in London, he continues his studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Winner of the Cultural Perspectives Foundation Scholarship, Bulgaria in 2019, and The Neville Burston Award for Painting, UK in 2015, among his most recent exhibitions are: ‘Pretty sure it’s just the wind’, Goethe Institute and ‘SWIMMING POOL’, Sofia in 2021, and ‘ORBIT’, Messeturm, Frankfurt, in 2020.