Peintre autodidacte dorigine lilloise né en 1984, qui vit et travaille à Paris.
En quelques années, il a déjà exposé nombre de ses oeuvres dans des galeries autour du monde, dont Paris, New York, Pékin et Shanghai.
« Une force empreinte d'une certaine mélancolie habite une grande partie de mes toiles. Les contrastes des sentiments me touchent, l'humain est au coeœur de mon travail, avec une réelle récurrence de l'iconographie féminine.
Les rapports humains nourrissent des questionnements passionnants et s'identifient à travers leurs contradictions. J'essaie de représenter les errements sentimentaux, psychologiques et socioculturels les plus symptomatiques de notre société consumériste, dans laquelle le culte de la personne est plus que jamais palpable.
J'appelle ce nouveau style personnel le POP EXPRESSIONNISME. »
Thomas MAINARDI
Bold and ostentatious, works by self-taught French painter Thomas Mainardi demand your attention. Against a backdrop of splashy brushwork, posterized figures, elegantly crafted from solid black, strike a pose. They are often notorious singers, artists, or media personalities postured in dynamic self-satisfaction. Concentrated hues, created with acrylic and spray-paint, clash on the canvas, forcefully brushed or dripping down the image to reveal textured layers beneath. Mainardi's paintings are direct and willful, employing the finest elements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in perfect accord, a style he has dubbed "Pop Expressionism. His work deals with many of the individualistic elements within Western society that are responsible for both our ills and our triumphs. Mainardi is exploring our consumerist society, he explains, in which the cult of the individual is more tangible than ever. His creative eye is steadily focused back on our collective self, delighting in our contradictions while forcing us to confront them.
Mainardi exhibits frequently in Europe, Asia and North America. He lives and works in Paris.
Agora Gallery - New York City - June 2010
Thomas Mainardis paintings are a hybrid of subjective impressions and pop culture images that evoke myriad moods, including eroticism, melancholy and deeply felt longing. His work, which he calls Pop Expressionism, often appropriates already extant pictures of women or well-known cultural figures. Thomas adds layers of aesthetic resonance to the images, as well as his own motifs. He reveals the unspoken themes that inherently cling to our fantasies of sexuality and glamour. There is a darker realm beneath this glam imagery; Thomas' paintings seem to be
saying, as his work straddles the line between portrait and psychedelia.
Thomas has said that the work process of painting constitutes a privileged universe of the chromatic fields which move him. For Thomas, art is a necessary subversion of normative social constraints which enables him to access a liberated sensuality and an exploration of fantasy. The result, his work, is a realm in which a glance, a posture, or a situation disturbs and irresistibly draws the attention. Thomas attempts to explore the contrast of moods which his work conjures as well as female iconography and its codes of seduction which permeate our society. His paintings, with their enigmatic titles and contemporary sirens, open up whole new worlds for us.
ARTisSpectrum Magazine n°23 - New York City - May 2010
