“If the world were clear, art would not exist.” (Albert Camus)

Max Mensa is born in Syracuse, Sicily, in 1978.

He begins his artistic journey at the school of arts in Syracuse. He develops a passion for painting very early on and focuses right away on abstract art. His early works are abstract watercolours but soon he begins to experiment with acrylics, paint spatula, palette knives and diverse forms of gesture on bigger canvases. This way, he develops step by step and auto-didactically his technique.

Max Mensa paints in a dimension of free unconsciousness. His works appear as a wild layering and intertwining of lines and colours without any apparent rational organisation but with great emotional involvement. By way of working on big canvases that provide freedom and space for his gesture and expressiveness, he develops moving and enigmatic images, that provoke a short circuit between reality and imagination, between certainty and doubt.

His works never cease to fascinate. They mirror an essential aspect of human perception: the amount of forms and colours that surround us threaten to overpower us until we are able to make sense of them as described by the laws of the ‘Gestalt’. To get there requires the will to overcome the chaos and start a mental journey into the substance of the painting. What comes to the fore changes over time. As a result, the element of time is crucial for his art. His works ask to be confronted intuitively and slowly. He invites the observer to immerse himself in this intuitive, limitless and permanent way into his big canvases and travel the worlds within. We cannot understand what surrounds us at a glance, neither can we decide what we will see. Max Mensa expresses this continuous encounter and construction of ‘reality’ in his works and makes space for the individuality of the observer.

Max Mensa paints, lives, exhibits and sells his paintings both in Italy and Germany.