Francesco Minuti is an Italian artist, born in Cosenza in 1992. He graduated from the State Art High School of Cosenza, earned a degree in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro, and completed an internship at the Academy of Madrid and the Prado Museum.
He has always frequented his father’s studio, the Master Diego Minuti, where he learned the secrets of the techniques used by the great masters of the past, reinterpreting their concepts in a contemporary key. The techniques he uses are very varied, including oil painting, the use of non-pictorial materials, and sculptures created from recycled materials of any origin.
By recovering the tradition of Renaissance portraiture and blending it with the expressive urgencies of contemporaneity, his work stands on the boundary line between physiognomic and psychoanalytic thought. It is a synthesis of a classical formal vocabulary, all played on the balance of plastic values and mimetic fidelity, and a chiaroscuro language capable of interpreting the lessons of 17th-century Caravaggism in light of a modern, contradictory sensitivity.
Thanks to the development of a stylistic signature that is quite distant from the recurring styles of the new figuration, he conducts his investigation into the expressive potential of the body through a gallery of extreme human types, battling against the annihilation of madness, illness, social difficulties such as migrations, old age, and death. The painted characters, or some fragments of them, tell through the body the eternal conflict between good and evil, of the world and of their own souls.
In his latest research, enriched by numerous travels with the eyes of an Anthropologist, there is an increased focus on physiognomy and, in general, on the mimetic representation of characters, turning towards a contained drama, renouncing theatricality, but reflecting more on the expressive potential of the individual.
The classical elements, however, are transfigured by the force of an energetic, solid, and vibrant painting, by the corrosions and oxidations of acids and fire, which pierce the barrier of time to return to us intact the centrality of the human figure, an indissoluble fusion of body and psyche.
He tells us the deafening silence of human brutality through portraits of children, women, men, or ancient paintings that recount thousands of stories, places, and eras corroded by human neglect.
He has participated in numerous awards and art exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, and the USA.
