Franco Minei’s paintings are exhilarating, dramatic, vibrantly colorful and strongly patterned. His concern is with the urbane society living in Italy today, the “lost souls” we have encountered in Fellini’s films. Here are the raconteurs, the cosmopolites, the pleasure seeking society of the 1960s, engaged in the frantic struggle of escaping loneliness. Most of Minei’s canvases are filled with highly realistic genre scenes; the remaining are more romantic figures, concerned with beauty, youth, love, and always with pathos. “Suzanne,” a successful painting of a young girl just emerging Into womanhood, places the subject on a collage suggesting other times in a woman’s life, and almost hostile in total effect. A recurrent mood of excitement, reflected in black and white checked patterns and red stripes accents Minei’s style. The colors are free and always highly theatrical. He is not concerned with social comment as much as with a highly individual view of the restless Italian today, expressed through color, design and implacable pattern.

––Michael Brawne

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