Futuropia Cities — Aqua Series

About the work

The spiral is the oldest architectural drawing in nature. This is what it looks like at full scale.

In Nautilus, Di Nicolantonio takes the most fundamental geometric principle in marine biology and builds a city from it. A great inhabited sphere — its surface crosshatched with the structural grid of a glass geodesic enclosure, its interior visible, a single human figure standing within rendering the whole composition suddenly, vertiginously immense — is embraced by a continuous spiral arm that coils around it with the patient, inevitable logic of a shell that has been growing for four hundred million years. To the left, free-floating concentric rings suggest the outer chambers of a cephalopod shell still in formation, not yet closed, still deciding what size to become.

The sphere is the inhabited present. The spiral is time.

Di Nicolantonio draws here with exceptional tonal range the dense hatching of the sphere interior contrasting with the clean, continuous line of the spiral arm, the darkness of the structural core against the lightness of the outer rings. It is the most graphically resolved work in the Aqua series a drawing that could be read as architecture, as biology, or as a diagram of how civilisations grow: outward from a centre, in ever-expanding rings, each one containing the logic of the one before.

In the Futuropia universe, Nautilus is the oceanic observatory of Verdania built at the point where the city meets the water, its spiral form a landmark visible from every approach, its interior a space in which the boundary between the studied and the inhabitable has been deliberately, permanently dissolved.

An original drawing from the Futuropia Cities — Aqua series by artist-futurist Sébastien Di Nicolantonio.

Edition Unique original — one of a kind

Signature Hand-signed by the artist

Authentication Sold with certificate of authenticity and gallery invoice

Technique Original drawing — pen on paper

Dimensions 29.7 × 42 cm — A3 format

Framing Unframed — framing available upon request