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 / Painting Characteristics Franco Monari's work is strongly guided by an initial image that can be taken directly by him, or that he come across in films, tv and on social media. Motifs and Developments Curtains