The exhibition Andrea Ravo Mattoni – img2img – Painting, Copying and Artificial Intelligence curated by Monica Guadalupi Morotti and Andrea Ceresa will be inaugurated on Saturday 6 April at 6.00 pm at the Castle of Masnago, open until 28 July.

Enzo R. Laforgia, Councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Varese, underlines how this important project also falls within the cultural activities of the city administration, aimed at enhancing the heritage and excellence of the territory. «We have the pleasure again – declares the 'Councillor - to host this artist, who exhibited for the first time at the Masnago Castle in 2016 in the Urban Canvas collective. Varese has always followed with interest the path of Ravo Mattoni who has created significant public works in the city and province and who is now offering us an innovative theme such as artificial intelligence, certainly capable of arousing the interest and curiosity of a large audience .»

Andrea Ravo Mattoni adds: «I am very happy to be able to announce my first solo show in a museum context but above all in the city where I was born, in Varese and in particular at the Masnago Castle. I will present unpublished works, linked to my latest project which involves both technology and the tradition of painting reinterpreted with the spray technique.»

Andrea Ravo Mattoni (1981) was born as a writer and then became a street artist, gaining fame with the recovery of classicism in the contemporary and the reproduction of works by great artists of the past through the use of the spray can and in this exhibition he introduces the theme of artificial intelligence.

Andrea Ravo Mattoni begins collaborating with generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2021 and in 2023 the artist creates his own AI: Inelegans. The title img2img (image-to-image) of Ravo's first Varese exhibition refers to the Artificial Intelligence technology that allows you to transform and modify an existing image. Simply upload it to the platform, write a prompt, that is, a description of how you would like to see that image change and wait a few moments. Such a specific reference to this type of technology evokes a broader process of image transformation, and this is the theme that will inspire the works exhibited at the Castle: reflections, distortions, interpretations and reinterpretations, copies, animations. Each image will be precariously and, at the same time, permanently fixed by the paint.

After the works in Trieste, Weil Am Rhein, Melano and Paris, the Varese exhibition at the Masnago Castle will be the fifth in which the artist's relationship with AI is central. Painting, Copying and Artificial Intelligence was born from those images generated by the machine and translated by Andrea Ravo Mattoni into spray painting, acrylic or drawing, both on walls and on canvas and other types of mobile supports. The exhibition will be composed of approximately twenty-five unpublished works displayed in the rooms of the Castle, also in dialogue with the fifteenth-century frescoes and a work from the permanent collection: Autumn Evening or Valpozzo by Pellizza da Volpedo (1903).