Gianfranco Mai Biography
Gianfranco Mai is an Italian artist born in Lodi, now in his seventies, who has found a real reason for living in artistic creation. This love for art also pushed him to leave his homeland to move to the South, specifically to a country house near Alberobello, the "capital" of the trulli, where he has lived and worked for several years.
Most of his works, whether sculptures, paintings, drypoints or drawings, focus on the theme of olive trees, the trees that particularly fascinated him. Even if every now and then he intersperses some depictions of the Apulian peasant "wives", now in danger of extinction. It seems that Gianfranco has a weakness for Puglia and its "silver sea", so much so that in 1967, after spending a few months of holiday in the area, he decided to leave everything and move permanently.
Inside his home/atelier, the line between living spaces and those dedicated to artistic creation seems to almost vanish, with hundreds of sculptures and paintings adorning every room. Most of his olive tree sculptures are made of different materials, depending on the inspiration of the moment: from the intertwined shapes of trunks cast in wax or earth, to the final materials such as bronze or iron. However, there is no shortage of bizarre technologies, such as melted plastic bottles or the ever-present terracotta.
But what seems to most characterize Gianfranco Mai's art are the human figures, especially the depiction of elderly people resting in the reassuring shade of an olive tree, a symbol of the visceral bond between man and nature. The human figure is an obsessive theme for Gianfranco, which returns in most of his works and which, through his olive tree sculptures very often, becomes a symbolization of nature itself.
