Alessandro Ravagnan is a self-taught conceptual artist who uses his art to explore scientific and spiritual concepts of cosmology, which has led to a meditative visual arts practice where individual works represent animate universes. In viewing his work, he invites the public to experience a cognitive shift in how they view their reality, similar to how astronauts describe viewing Earth from space. This phenomenon, dubbed the Overview Effect, is an epiphanic experience where international borders vanish and the conflicts that divide people become inconsequential. This experience connects viewers to a living cosmology, evoking tenets of ancient cultures that position humans as just one strand in a multi-dimensional web of life, not the apex of all creation.
My pieces are generative collages, created by tearing up multiple sheets of screen-printed patterns that are then pieced together into a final composition. The destruction of the original screen printed sheets and their recombination into a balanced whole becomes a sitting meditation reminiscent of gazing meditation practices. This process engenders an alternate view of reality where animate universes experience their life cycles in the invisible quantum dimension that underpins ours, while dying universes like our own occupy this “material” reality.
Selected Work
