Project Room #7 | Donato Piccolo. Imprévisible

On April 11, the solo exhibition of Donato Piccolo (Rome, 1976), entitled Imprévisible, opens. It is the first event in the new cycle of the Project Rooms 2018, an initiative through which the Foundation offers young curators and artists its space and expertise to present the latest trends in contemporary sculpture to the public.

The Project Rooms 2018 are curated by Flavio Arensi, who has developed a three-part project entitled Proust’s Room, a pretext for observing the events of society and humanity through sounds, absences and presences, from both the past and the future. The three moments that will unfold in this room will form a single reflection on the role of sculpture in the current historical moment. With the three artists involved in the 2018 Project Rooms – says Arensi – we aim to recover, through their work, the idea of an expanded consciousness that does not employ the most traditional means of sculpture, but rather explores its deeper concepts through technology and space.

For the first of the three events, Donato Piccolo presents a group of previously unseen works under the title Imprévisible, a French term born from the fusion of “unpredictable” and “invisible,” which aptly captures the short-circuit between nature and artificiality that characterizes the Roman artist’s insect-like machines. The analysis of the existential gap separating humans from both natural and artificial reality, in relation to the dimension of time, has always been central to Piccolo’s work. At the Foundation, he presents his robotic sculptures—objects/subjects capable of interacting with visitors. Thanks to robotic mechanisms and artificial intelligence, the works will be able to move, register audience reactions, and adjust their behavior accordingly. Piccolo’s sculptures, which seem to learn and act autonomously, define the field of human absence.

The initiative, under the patronage of the Municipality of Milan and the Lombardy Region, is one of the official events of “Art Week,” the program promoted by the Municipality of Milan on the occasion of Miart.