PAOLO CAVINATO  (Born in 1975 in Mantua, Italy.  Lives and works in Mantua )

Paolo Cavinato creates immersive, multi-sensory spaces that blend images of reality with imagined viewpoints. His work explores planes, surfaces, and lines to evoke a “diverse space” that is both disoriented and disorienting, abstract and figurative.

The Solaris series presents a panoramic view of an imaginary architectural space, composed of dizzying perspectives that evoke a virtual dimension or the metaverse. Angular walls, metal structures, windows, thresholds, and long, empty corridors form an inscrutable labyrinth. At the center and in the foreground, a tangled, complex system emerges, animated by suspended, luminous geometric shapes in various colors.

This imagined architecture resembles a vast waiting room or limbo, a negative dimension suspended between life and death. It approaches a vision of post-science fiction, reminiscent of the world depicted in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris and its 1972 film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. A  sequence of modular cells repeats with uniform shapes but increasingly varied shades, reflecting the concept of pictorial matter composed of luminous particles, alternating between solid and void, between flatness and depth. The tesserae—ranging in hues from cobalt blue to emerald green, magenta to copper—generate a rhythmic, iridescent surface that appears to move. Lines alternate, creating harmonies and rhythmic tempos where the space fluctuates in depth, bringing the viewer closer and then pushing them back into the scene.