Claudio Monnini

Through a gestural and instinctive painting, Claudio Monnini’s men and women live in a state of eternal amazement and profound empathy in front of the chaos, the dynamism and mysterious beauty of natural elements.

Claudio Monnini is an instinctual painter of strong culture and extraordinary imagination, who reconstructs fantastic worlds with dramatic tones, populated by beings that seem to live in a dimension of eternal disturbance and anxiety, a metaphor for a human condition with highly dramatic traits. Immersed in a perennially agitated, restless nature that always seems on the verge of exploding and returning to its original and primitive state of chaos; the men and women of Monnini live in a state of eternal amazement and profound empathy in the face of chaos, to the dynamism and mysterious beauty of the natural element, as if they were faced with the continuous manifestation, before their eyes, of the very act of the creation of the world and of nature. In Monnini's painting there are reminiscences of the romantic and expressionist pictorial tradition, but also of a lot of informal and realistic painting that characterized the Italian artistic tradition, and in particular Lombardy, in the Fifties and Sixties. His painting goes beyond the realism of everyday life to enter into an almost dreamlike, strongly symbolic dimension, with neo-existentialist traits. The element of water, which characterizes many of his views, refers to an ancestral desire to reconnect with the original soul of the universe, in search of an underground harmony that the contemporary world seems to have irreparably lost. He uses a mixed media technique where oil colour, espresso coffee and acrylics give shape to the scene through a gestural and instinctive painting.

Claudio Monnini was born in Milan, Monnini is an architect and artist. He participated in several institutional exhibitions promoted by important art critics, including Vittorio Sgarbi who also invited him to exhibit at the 54th Venice Biennial.; His works are also in prestigious private and public collections in Europe and the United States. Now a well known portraitist, he began painting with models at the age of 12 in his parents’ (who were famous post-war artists) atelier. Since 2010 he has been painting works where landscape, imagination and bodies together speak the universal language of emotions, linked to the desire to launch one themselves forward.