Ruudt Peters

The brooch SUCTUS “Aspirazione” (2018) by Ruudt Peters stages a precise negotiation between containment and emergence. Formally, the object is structured as a shallow, asymmetrical silver vessel. Its geometry neither fully organic nor strictly industrial. The outer shell presents a matte, controlled surface, its muted tonality absorbing light rather than reflecting it. This restraint establishes a boundary condition: a perimeter that appears stable, rational, and fabricated.

Within this container, however, a contrasting interior mass asserts itself. The cinnabar-toned polyester core which is viscous in appearance, and saturated in color,—presses upward and outward, as if held in a state of suspension or arrested expansion. Its surface reads as soft, almost bodily, in opposition to the rigid, metallic enclosure. The tension between these two material registers—silver as fixed structure, polyester as mutable substance. This produces a dynamic that is not resolved but sustained.

The title “SUCTUS” (Latin for “drawing in” or “suction”) and Aspirazione (“aspiration,” “breath,” or “desire”) activates this formal tension symbolically. The work can be read as a diagram of intake and pressure: an interior force being contained, or conversely, a process of absorption that transforms what is external into something internalized. The red core evokes associations with flesh, blood, or alchemical matter. These arw substances historically tied to transformation, vitality, and risk. In this sense, the piece operates within Peters’ broader engagement with alchemy: not as literal transmutation, but as a metaphor for the conversion of immaterial states. How thought, desire, knowledge are tranferred into physical form.

Crucially, the brooch format situates this tension on the body. Unlike autonomous sculpture, “SUCTUS” is activated through wear, implicating the wearer as both host and mediator. The “aspiration” suggested by the title is no longer abstract; it becomes somatic through??????. The object reads almost as an organ or prosthetic extension . Like all art, it is something that attaches to the body while simultaneously suggesting an internal process made visible. This is through the hand directly or decision made by the mind. This aligns with Peters’ stated disinterest in decoration as surface enhancement.

Instead, the work operates as a philosophical device: a material proposition about interiority, transformation, and the permeability between body and object.
Form and symbol are therefore inseparable here. The formal opposition between containment (silver) and expansion (polyester) is not illustrative of meaning; it is the mechanism through which meaning is generated. The piece does not represent aspiration, but it enacts it, holding the viewer in a suspended moment where pressure, desire, and transformation remain unresolved yet intensely present.

References

Nassrin Vessalian. (n.d.). Nassrin Vessalian [Artist page]. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://www.no-gram.com/226-nassrin-vessalian⁠�

Tamagit. (n.d.). Sundown I brooch object Nassrin Vessalian [Gallery page]. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://tamagit.com/art-gallery/sundown-i-brooch-object-nassrin-vessalian/⁠�