The Beginnings Franco Monari was born in Carpi (Modena) in 1981. In the early 2000s, he enrolled at the DAMS (Arts and Music Studies) in Bologna and regularly visited the studio of Carpi painter Gualtiero Gualtieri, who helped him deepen his knowledge of painting and canvas preparation. His first paintings were 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 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, almost always “out of place” for the period and context: from digital compacts to low-quality reflex cameras, from expired Polaroids to the large format of a bulky and obsolete optical bench. Return to painting During the Coronavirus lockdown period (2020), Monari returned to the act of painting that he had abandoned at the beginning of the early 2010s to dedicate himself to photography. Influenced by the particular situation of isolation, he begins to feel a strong sense of nostalgia towards Poland, his maternal origin country, where he spent long periods during his childhood. He start to search for images "compatible" with his memories of the 1980s through the obsessioned viewing of hundreds of TV news 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, 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.