Ten years after the launch of the Oilrobots – Futuro Anteriore project, Fabrizio Spadini once again questions his own artistic journey with Tramature dell’immaginario, a solo exhibition curated by Rosanna Accordino, running in Pavia from 14 to 29 November 2026 at the L2Arte gallery.

The exhibition retraces a decade of pictorial research in which the artist has developed a poetics founded on the interplay between images from collective memory and the tradition of painting. The starting point is the robots and icons of 1970s and 1980s Japanese popular culture – from Goldrake to Mazinga and Jeeg – set within landscapes inspired by Italian painting. The future, represented by the machine, is thus placed in a recognisable past, creating a temporal short circuit in which memory and imagination overlap.

Over the years, Spadini’s repertoire has broadened through a dialogue with the history of twentieth-century art, from Metaphysical painting to Futurism, with references to artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Mario Sironi and Pablo Picasso. The machine has gradually ceased to be merely a subject and has become a lens through which to observe humankind, its aspirations and its fears in the face of technology. A particularly significant development of this reflection is the Decalogo (Decalogue) series, in which the Ten Commandments are set in relation to Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics and reinterpreted as a possible ethical code for artificial intelligence. The sacred and technology thus meet in the need to define rules for a new form of intelligence created by humans.

In his most recent works, by contrast, the icons are progressively disintegrated. The figure gives way to the sign, the trace and repetition, leading to the construction of new landscapes in which the image seems to dissolve into pictorial matter. This evolution gave rise to the title of the exhibition, which recalls the “tramature” (“weavings”) of Emilio Scanavino: while in the work of the Genoese artist the weave alludes to human bonds and connections, in Spadini’s research it becomes a metaphor for the ever-closer relationship between humans and machines, nature and technology.

Tramature dell’immaginario is at once a stocktaking and a point of transition: from robots to the disintegration of the figure, from icon to sign, from memory to the image of memory. It is a journey in which Spadini calls into question what we believe we remember, suggesting that what we retain is often not the original experience, but its representation.

Highlights include the complete Decalogo series, a previously unseen work dedicated to the city of Pavia and, for the first time, a work dedicated to Dylan Dog, presented to mark the fortieth anniversary of the comic’s first publication.

Exhibition details

Tramature dell’immaginario
Solo exhibition by Fabrizio Spadini
L2ARTE Gallery, Viale della Libertà 2/b, 27100 Pavia
From 14 to 29 November 2026
Opening: Saturday 14 November, 6 pm
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday, 3 pm – 7 pm; Saturday, 11 am – 7 pm; Sunday, 3 pm – 7 pm
Free admission

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