franco monari

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Italy, 1981
info@francomonari.com
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About

 Franco Monari’s painting responds to a deep, intimate, and necessary inner need. His creative process develops from a visual fragment: images taken personally or found within the digital flow of the web become the initial spark, the trace from which to take the first steps. The photograph is not replicated, but internalized, post-produced on a smartphone, and finally translated onto the canvas. Through color and the painterly gesture, Monari strips the starting image of its original context to satisfy a purely personal need for expression. There is no intention to explain the world, but rather to inhabit it through the act of painting. The canvas thus becomes the place for a private dialogue, where the urgency and torment of creating matter far more than the final meaning. There is a clear rejection of narrative: Monari does not want to tell stories or deliver moral messages through his images; the painting must not be a window to the world, but a surface covered in pigment

Bio

The Beginnings
Franco Monari was born in Carpi (Modena) in 1981. In the early 2000s, he enrolled at DAMS (Arts and Music Studies) in Bologna and regularly visited the studio of Italian painter Gualtiero Gualtieri, who helped him deepen his knowledge of painting and canvas preparation. His first paintings featured poems written on canvas and female nudes. He began exhibiting in bars and small galleries and published a collection of poems and paintings titled Faszination (Mucchi Editore, 2006).In 2007/2008, he explored photography and began researching industrial archaeology, photographing abandoned factories and hospitals along with other "urban explorers" he met on early online forums. Over time, he stopped painting and devoted himself entirely to photography, also attending courses and workshops with Gabriele Basilico and Francesco Jodice.

Photography
His work focused on photographs of abandoned interiors, factories, mental institutions, sanatoriums, socialist architecture, and landscapes of "non-places." For many years, these were the only subjects photographed by Monari, using a wide variety of equipment that was almost always “out of place” for the period and context: from digital compacts to low-quality reflex cameras, and from expired Polaroids to a large-format, bulky, and obsolete optical bench.

Return to Painting
During the Coronavirus lockdown period (2020), Monari returned to painting, an art form he had abandoned in the early 2010s to dedicate himself to photography. Influenced by the unique situation of isolation, he began to feel a strong sense of nostalgia for Poland, his mother's home country, where he had spent long periods during his childhood.He started to search for images "compatible" with his memories of the 1980s through the obsessive viewing of hundreds of TV news broadcasts from the years of communist Poland. The result is a series of darkly colored paintings with heavy shadows, painted mainly using Payne’s grey, sap green, titanium white, and phthalocyanine blue. The subjects depicted are humble and everyday, developed in multiples—almost in contrast with the rules of isolation and the single individual: dozens of milk bottles arranged on the shelves of a supermarket in Warsaw, stacks of shirts in a cotton mill in Krakow, or glass sets for tea and vodka.
Artworks / Motifs

Curtains
The artist harbors a genuine fascination with interior curtains, which have become one of her most frequently painted subjects. On the canvas, the curtain transforms into a nostalgic element, suspended in a delicate limbo between the figurative and the abstract. This visual fascination is rooted in childhood memories from the 1980s—a period she experienced firsthand during long stays in Poland and East Germany.
Her gaze focuses on embroidered lace curtains—typical of Soviet-era imagery—and balloon curtains; these were originally white fabrics, yet her memory associates them with shades of gray. The atmosphere of that Eastern European era re-emerges on the canvas through a distinct color palette, dominated by Payne’s gray blended with green. These tones envelop forms and filter the light, translating memories not as historical record, but as a pure, intimate emotional evocation.

Cv

selected awards
2021   Finalist Premio Mestre di Pittura
2021   Recommended Premio Combat
2018   Finalist Premio Fabbri
2017   Nominee Award International Photogrvphy Award
2017   Winner Premio Nocivelli
2016   Shortlisted Premio Celeste
2014   Finalist Premio Yicca
2014   Shortlisted Premio Celeste
2010   Finalist Premio Terna 03

art auction
2024   Weserhalle Art Gallery, Berlin

selected exhibitions
2024   group Equivoci, Gare 82 Gallery, Brescia
2021   group Premio Mestre di Pittura, Centro Culturale Candiani, Venezia (catalog)
2021   group Come se niente fosse, Artfarm Pilastro, Verona
2020   group Per quanto tempo è per sempre, Officina Giovani, Prato
2020   solo Detriti / E le città saranno ripopolate e le rovine riscostruite, SACI Studio Arts College Int., Firenze
2019   group Ars Gratia Artis, Galleria ArteSì, Modena
2019   group Collateral Beauty, Paratissima 15 Art Fair - N.I.C.E, Ex Accademia Artiglieria, Torino (catalog)
2018   solo Il cielo non importa, curated by Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz, Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia (catalog)
2018   solo Amor loci, curated by Cristina Muccioli, Galleria ArteSì, Modena
2018   group Premio Francesco Fabbri, curated by Carlo Sala, Villa Brandolini, Pieve di Soligo (catalog)
2017   group Premio Nocivelli, Chiesa della Disciplina, Verolanuova (catalog)
2017   group Topoi, L’Appartamento, Firenze
2017   group Streamers, curated by Irene Alison, Officine Fotografiche, Roma (catalog)
2017   group Confini_14, Galleria VisionQuest, Genova
2014   group Yicca Prize, LIL Lugano Innovation Lab, Botti Buildings, Lugano (catalog)
2010   group 25th Chelsea Int. Fine Art Competition Exhibition, Agorà Gallery, New York