Mauro Menin - Artist
About
Born in Italy, Mauro Menin is a self-taught painter whose work is rooted in a sustained fascination with the human figure and the complexity of inner life. Trained as an industrial designer, he brings to painting a disciplined eye — one accustomed to observing how people inhabit the world, how they move, feel, and relate — and transforms that attentiveness into an expressive figuration that oscillates between intimacy and universality.
His practice is guided by close observation and genuine engagement with the subject. Working primarily in oils, Mauro seeks not the literal transcription of what is seen, but the essential truth beneath it; the psychological weight of a posture, the silent language of a gesture, the presence that lingers after the obvious has been stripped away. Form, for him, is never merely descriptive; it is always expressive. Guided by a sense of balance and intent inherited from his design background, he works by reduction, preserving only what carries meaning.
His paintings take many forms: a celebration of beauty, a quiet provocation, a challenge to accepted ways of seeing, or an open question deliberately left unanswered. What remains constant is the intent, to look past the surface, and to invite the viewer to do the same. Through his work, he seeks to inspire a more careful, more honest engagement with the world: to encourage those who stand before his paintings to reconnect, to question, to accept, or simply to discover beauty in places they had not thought to look. In the end, his practice is a sustained act of faith in humanity, in all its fragility, contradiction, and quiet grace.
Mauro Menin’s art has been showcased in commercial venues such Bricklane Gallery in London, UK, and Lila Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany, and was also published in Spotlight magazine by the Circle Foundation for the Arts. It can be found in many private collections in France, Germany, UK, Italy and the USA.
In 2024 his painting Brian J. was selected as part of the FAV15% (jury's favorite 15% of the entries) in the November 2024 BoldBrush Painting competition.
In 2025 his works were selected as part of the finalists of the first edition of the tARTget art prize. His portrait of Jean Michel Basquiat was awarded with the Barcelona Academy of Art prize.
His painting 'At the beach' made it to the final of 'Figures & Faces 2025 Art Exhibition'.
Artist statement
I work primarily in oils, a medium that suits the way I think. Depending on the intention behind a piece, I move between two approaches: a slow, layered process, building up the painting across multiple sessions, refining as understanding deepens and alla prima, completing the work in a single sitting to preserve a freshness and instinctive quality that deliberation can't replicate. Light and shadow do much of the work in both: through their interplay, I build the richness and depth that a more direct approach rarely allows.
My process moves in alternating phases of construction and deconstruction. Bold, loose brushstrokes establish the subject; then scraping and smudging break it apart again. I work in layers, each one quietly advancing an intention, until something true begins to emerge from the accumulated marks. There is a tension at the heart of this way of working, between the freedom that creation requires and the pull toward resemblance, toward honoring the subject and the original idea. That tension is not a problem to solve. It is where the painting lives.
What I'm after, in the end, is work that holds two things at once: the outward life of people, their gestures and behaviors and ways of moving through the world, and something more interior, harder to name. The paintings are examinations: of how we live, what we carry, and what we reveal without meaning to. They aim to celebrate, question, and at times challenge; but above all, to look honestly at what it means to be human.