In AEDES I and DOMUS VACUITATIS I, Renato Nicolodi reduces architecture to its bare essentials: mass, opening, shadow, and silence. His sculptures do not function as models for real buildings. Instead, they draw on archetypal forms from different times and cultures, stripped of ornament and practical use, so they become places for reflection rather than occupation. Across his practice, corridors, stairs, and framed openings lead the eye inward toward a dark center that stays unreachable.  

AEDES I can be read as a small shrine or sanctuary. Its stepped inner frame pulls your gaze into a black void, turning a simple concrete object into something contemplative and almost ceremonial. The work is not about entering a space physically, but about sensing an inner space mentally. That tension between solid concrete and an inaccessible interior is central to Nicolodi’s language.  

DOMUS VACUITATIS I feels slightly more enclosed and austere. The title suggests a “house of emptiness,” and that is exactly what the sculpture stages: a built form whose meaning lies in what is absent. Like much of Nicolodi’s work, it preserves a sense of memory and thought while refusing narrative. The emptiness is not cold, but concentrated. It gives the sculpture its stillness and gravity.  

Together, the two works show what makes Nicolodi’s sculpture so distinctive: he uses architecture not to describe the world outside us, but to give shape to an inner, metaphysical one.  

The three paintings unfold as a sequence of architectural spaces in which light and darkness probe one another. Pronaos Tenebris I and Pronaos Tenebris II open as antechambers: shadowy structures where stairs, masses, and voids slow the gaze and give the space an almost tangible density.

Between these two works appears Ex tenebris, lux, in which a white oculus breaks through the black architecture. The light that enters is small, yet decisive: not an explanation, not a solution, but a minimal shift that reorients the space. At a time when unrest and uncertainty narrow our horizon, this opening reminds us that clarity often begins as something exceedingly modest.

Together, the works do not form a closed narrative, but a field of tension. A movement from shadow to light, from enclosure to possibility. Here, hope is not articulated, but made tangible, as a quiet presence that emerges precisely where darkness seems most dense.