MECHANICAL INTELLIGENCES FROM THE UNIVERSE
60 Years of Research on Spacecraft and Sentient Spaceships
in collaboration with Archivio Renato Volpini, Milan
OPENING
February 5th, from 6 to 8.30 PM
Via Gorani 8, MILAN
February 6th – March 31st, 2025
Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to announce the exhibition “Mechanical Intelligences from the Universe – 60 Years of Research on Spacecraft and Sentient Spaceships,” a solo show by Renato Volpini (Naples, 1934 – Milan, 2017), a science fiction-inspired painter and sculptor, skilled engraver, and dynamic experimenter. Starting February 5, 2025, the entire space at Via Gorani 8 in Milan will be taken over by Volpini’s myriad of visionary spaceships and space machines, projecting the viewer into the infinite celestial vault that surrounds us.
Unique in his approach and unclassifiable within any artistic movement, Renato Volpini, born in Naples but trained in Urbino (IT), drew from tradition and the artistic ferment of his time—initially Informalism, then Pop Art—constantly renewing and reinterpreting them, maintaining a distinctive autonomy. As the renowned critic Gillo Dorfles, a staunch advocate of Volpini’s work, wrote in 2007: “The extremely free and independent interpretation of figuration and spatiality has always allowed Renato Volpini to avoid being confined within the frameworks of abstractionism or naturalism.”
During a stay in Panarea in 1961, Volpini recounted seeing a spacecraft hovering above the sea’s horizon. From that moment, his work, defined by movement and exploration, turned toward the “Elsewhere”, investigating and imagining the same celestial routes that science was beginning to chart. Fascinated by the myth of spacecraft and space engineering, Volpini reimagined mechanical elements, creating vibrant shapes that he assembled and combined to bring surreal, dreamlike figures to life. In this process of form-building and assemblage, the artist animated his space mechanisms, personifying them and merging the collective imagination’s subjectivity with the objectivity of the machine.
Volpini’s machines, therefore, gain reasoning and internalize human essence. The viewer is invited to traverse the infinite Universe not merely as a being within a vehicle but as an alien space machine, identifying with the dynamic object itself thanks to the intelligence and personality it possesses.
Volpini conveys the dynamism of these machines through vivid, brilliant colors that generate a surreal, dreamlike world in perpetual motion. The cosmic space thus becomes an extension of earthly imagination, animated by sentient spaceships and mechanical intelligences that will take over the Milanese venue at Via Gorani 8 until March 31, 2025.
The exhibition is open from Monday to Friday on appointment (art@allegraravizza.com).
