Mauro Menin - Artist 

I paint people in the moments when what they show and what they carry come apart.

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I came to painting from industrial design, after a move far from home left me needing somewhere to put what I couldn't say. That need still drives the work: a posture, a turned back, a figure at the edge of a diving board, each holding something more interior and harder to name.

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I work in oils, building and destroying. Loose strokes establish the figure, then scraping and smudging break it apart again, layer after layer, until something true survives the accumulated marks. Between the freedom painting needs and the pull toward likeness there is a tension I don't try to resolve. It is where the painting lives.

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Some paintings stay close, with figures caught at moments of hesitation, decision or release. Others turn outward, to the lives of people pushed to the margins. All of them ask the same thing of the viewer: to look past the surface, and stay.