Sergio Lombardo
Aesthetic Engineering: V-RAN MCCT Stochastic Compositions
Minimal, Compact, Complete, and Toroidal—also referred to as MCCT—are the characteristics Lombardo attributes to the floor generated from a single tile arranged to form a pattern that saturates the pictorial surface.
The works are polychrome minimal prototypes created through the V-RAN algorithm, devised by the artist to generate the random displacement of the prototype’s vertices. They represent the most recent evolution of a line of research begun in 1990 on stochastic maps inscribed on tiles.
They are minimal because they lack redundancies; the absence of holes or empty spaces determines their compactness. Completeness, on the other hand, ensures the presence of all possible rotations of the tile without repetition, while toroidality defines the infinite possibility of omnidirectional repetition without interrupting the pattern.
On the occasion of the fifth solo exhibition of the artist at Palazzo Santacroce, 1/9unosunove presents an impressive selection of V-RAN MCCT Stochastic Compositions—large-scale works measuring 150 × 300 cm, as well as compositions reaching 300 × 600 cm—as a fundamental turning point in Lombardo’s research within the vast field of Stochastic Painting, and particularly in floor compositions.
These compositions originated in the 1990s as bichromatic modules, minimal in the number of regions, colors, vertices, and edges, processed using the S-RAN algorithm. In the early 2000s, they were processed with the SAT algorithm—developed by the artist between 1980 and 1985 along with the TAN and RAN algorithms—to create modular polychrome units generated by stochastic trees. Only in this most recent phase of research is the V-RAN algorithm applied to this type of prototype.
From this scientific insight arises the possibility of identifying, within engineering, the means to create algorithms capable of generating “beauty,” understood in an event-based sense, and of dismantling the apparent contrast between beauty and the scientific method.
Aesthetic engineering, through the creation of specific mathematical tools, seeks an art oriented toward more complex aesthetic results than those generated solely by intuition or by the technical application of digital tools typical of craftsmanship.