Valerio Berruti at Fondazione Ferrero: "More than kids"

The Weightless Intensity of the Human Soul

Valerio Berruti’s “More than Kids” at Fondazione Ferrero

Last week, I immersed myself once again in the delicate, resonant world of Valerio Berruti, visiting his latest exhibition More than Kids at the Fondazione Ferrero in Alba. And just as every encounter with his art has done for the past fifteen years, it left me suspended,  somewhere between memory and breath, thought and emotion.

This was not a first meeting. Over time, I have not only followed Berruti’s artistic evolution but have attempted, in my own words, to map the intangible vibrations of his visual language. Since my earliest experience of his work nearly a decade and a half ago, I’ve witnessed a metamorphosis not only in form but in soul. The same minimal lines remain. The hushed palette. The fresco-like immediacy. But behind it all is now a deeper, more persistent questioning. A kind of gentle insistence: what does it mean to exist, to remember, to love in a world so quick to forget?

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More Than an Exhibition — A Breathing Space of Memory and Light

From the moment I stepped into the Fondazione Ferrero’s space, time seemed to slow. The silence wasn’t empty, it was charged, sacred. As if the walls themselves had absorbed the voices of the figures that float upon them.

Berruti’s palette, warm greys, chalk whites, faded ochres, and the most delicate sky blues,  doesn’t reflect light so much as hold it, softly, like cupped hands. His figures, often children, families, or solitary silhouettes,  are not depictions. They are echoes. Archetypes. Wisps of universal experience rendered with heartbreaking restraint.

One does not look at Berruti’s art. One listens.

And as I moved through the rooms, I felt as if I were walking through a house of shared memory, not mine, not his, but ours. There, suspended between presence and absence, were the fragments of a collective tenderness we are all in danger of losing.

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The Works That Touched the Deepest Chord

Among the many luminous presences in the show, some works reached directly into the chest:

• "La figlia di Isacco"
  A monumental painting of a young girl, her arms crossed, her gaze lowered. There is nothing theatrical in her pose, and yet she radiates a quiet monumentality. She is both sacred and wounded, an icon of interiority.

• "L'abbraccio più forte"
  A sculpture of two children embracing. Their bodies lean into each other, yet retain their individuality, a silent, stone-carved poem of closeness without collapse, affection without ownership. I stood before it for a long time, remembering embraces I had long forgotten.

• "Kizuna" (Video installation)
  A hypnotic, hand-drawn animation accompanied by a score from Ryuichi Sakamoto. The title, Japanese for “bond,” resonates like a breath between two people. Each movement, each line, each pause, it all seemed to whisper of the threads that hold us even when we drift apart.

• "Aurora"
  A sculpture that stood as a hymn to beginnings. The child figure, tender, upright, almost glowing, reminded me of first lights, of first understandings, of that vulnerable moment when we begin to see the world not just through our eyes but through our soul. “Aurora” is not just a child. She is the dawn of emotional consciousness.

Valerio Berruti - Aurora

• "Nel Silenzio"
  This bas-relief, depicting three girls sleeping on a cracked, sun-scorched earth, stirred something darker, more urgent. Beyond the serenity of the image lies a cry: a meditation on climate change, on what we’re letting slip quietly away. It is a silence filled with warning, lullaby, and lament all at once.

Valerio Berruti - Nel Silenzio (In the Silence)

• The Langhe Series
  Eighteen frescoes portraying landscapes of the artist’s home region. Unlike his human figures, these works feel like open windows, places for the viewer to enter and complete. They are meditative, unfinished in the most generous sense. And as I stood before them, I felt the weight of place, of belonging, of origins.

• "Endless Love"
  A series of rice-paper drawings. Two siblings in an eternal embrace. There was something so pure, so quiet in those lines, as if Berruti had managed to draw the feeling of being understood. No drama. Just the soft gravity of love that neither begins nor ends.

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The Artistic Voice of Valerio Berruti: From Fresco to Spirit

Berruti’s language is grounded in fresco, a dialogue with the Romanesque tradition that he continues to refine and reinterpret. But it is not history he repeats. It is history he redeems.

There is now more silence in his work, more space, but that space is not emptiness. It is filled with tension, with spiritual residue, with the weight of things unspoken. His background in architecture can still be felt in the balance of voids and forms, but now even the figures seem to carry inner architecture — rooms inside their eyes, vaults in the tilt of their shoulders.

Valerio Berruti - Vocazione (Vocation)

His art doesn’t seek to explain. It seeks to hold. To contain. To allow.

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The Man Who Draws to Remember

I’ve never had the opportunity to sit across from Valerio Berruti, to ask him in person the questions his work evokes. But I hope one day I will.

From what I’ve gathered through interviews and public conversations, he is as essential as his lines — thoughtful, rooted, intentional. Living and working in a deconsecrated church in Alba, which he restored by hand, Berruti seems less interested in spectacle than in quiet persistence.

He doesn’t provoke. He invites.

And in that invitation, something radical happens: the return of tenderness as a central artistic act.

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Leaving with Gratitude, Returning with Thought

As I stepped out of the Fondazione Ferrero, the world outside seemed louder, more hurried. But I carried with me a residue, not of images, but of sensation. Of warmth. Of stillness.

Valerio Berruti’s More than Kids is not just an exhibition. It is a breathing archive of all that remains unsaid in human connection. It is a reminder that in a time of accelerated forgetting, slowness can be an act of remembrance. That tenderness is a form of courage. That fragility, when drawn with sincerity, can become the most unshakable truth.

This is not just art. It is soul work.

And I, for one, feel a little more human for having experienced it.