One the most innovative artists of his generation, Pietro Roccasalva takes inspiration from Byzantine art and medieval Sienese school painting, pushing his pictorial language into conceptualism territory much as Roman artist Gino de Dominicis did in the 1970s and in the 1980s. Intelligent Artifice(r), while intimately scaled, has a mystic grandiosity similar to the Russian icon by artist-monk Andrei Rublev. Its aura, melding futuristic android imagery with potent Eastern devotion, occupies a symbolic space utterly classic and contemporary at the same time.