The Allegra Ravizza Gallery announces the exhibition “Mechanical Intelligences from the Universe – 60 years of research on space machines and spaceships sentient” personal exhibition by Renato Volpini (Naples, 1934 – Milan, 2017), science fiction painter and sculptor, skilled engraver and dynamic experimenter.

Starting from February 5, 2025 the Milan office located in Via Gorani 8 it will be conquered by Volpini’s myriad of visionary spaceships and space machines which will project the spectator into the infinite celestial vault that surrounds us.

One of a kind, not labelable or pigeonholed into any artistic movement, Renato Volpini, Neapolitan by birth but educated in Urbino, draws on tradition and the artistic ferment of his time – first Informal and then Pop Art – continually renewing and reworking them so much so as to always maintain its distinctive autonomy. As the famous critic wrote in 2007 Gillo Dorfles, one of the greatest supporters of his work, “the extremely free and autonomous interpretation of figuration and spatiality has always allowed to Renato Volpini to avoid pigeonholing within the framework of abstractionism or naturalism“.

During a stay in Panarea in 1961 Volpini says he spotted a space machine above the horizon of the sea, from that moment on all his work, in the name of movement and research, turns to Elsewhere, investigating and imagining those same routes celestial bodies that science was planning to travel. Fascinated by the myth of spaceships and space engineering, Volpini adapts the mechanical element by generating brightly colored silhouettes that he assembles and joins together to give life to new surreal and dreamlike figurations. During this process and assembly of forms, the artist manages to animate the spatial designs and personify them by bringing together the subjectivity of the collective imagination within the objectivity of the machine. In fact, Volpinian machines take reason and internalize the human essence. The user is therefore free to travel and cross the infinite Universe no longer as a being inside a vehicle but as an alien space machine, identifying with the dynamic object itself thanks to the intelligence and character that the latter possesses.

The dynamism of the machine is rendered by Volpini through the brilliance and liveliness of the colors which generate a surreal and dreamlike world in continuous movement.

Cosmic space therefore becomes an extension of earthly fantasy animated by sentient spaceships and mechanical intelligences that will invade the Milanese space in Via Gorani 8 until March 31, 2025.

Carlo Franza