The artist

"In some way, I've always had art by my side in my life. Sometimes choices lead you down different paths, but the art within me is like a friend who is always there. I am a businessman (a psychologist and a technician) who has never stopped loving oil painting and playing an instrument like the piano. Circumstances and the education I received sometimes lead you on paths that don't always align with your aspirations. My creativity has allowed me to develop and invent new tools for work and socialization.

I am a self-taught painter who learned from a young age to play with art, to dream, to invent new things, but above all, to silently observe the surrounding world: people with their ways, objects, and environments. Observing, understanding is a great source of learning for me. Then come the books and treatises on painting: Cennini, Da Vinci, De Chirico, Maimeri. These are fundamental manuals to understand how to improve or deepen what you have learned through personal experience, sometimes by making mistakes and trying again.

My artistic evolution started with a passion for landscapes and classic still lifes, and then in adulthood, I discovered the world of industrial archaeology. Life presents you with many choices, but also many opportunities, and sometimes you stumble upon new worlds by chance; however, you need to know how to "catch" them and make them your own. I love discovering and delving deeper: I collect insects and mechanical calculators.

And it all starts from a used book found at a market; it becomes my world: industrial archaeology. From photos of old sites taken by others, the desire to personally photograph the industrial places I explored was born; I wanted to experience and choose the image that could reflect my state of mind to represent. Go to Paris and truly look at the Eiffel Tower from the inside, in all the daylight... you'll discover many paintings!

Then the introduction of variations born from a concept that was increasingly revealing itself to me; the yellow container! An object that observes the observer and asks, "What do you think might be inside?" To this day, I am all of this, and perhaps the time has come to open the lid.

My thoughts on industrial archaeology (excerpt from my website).
I've always admired old industrial buildings, once tools of humanity, then abandoned to themselves like cathedrals of a bygone industrial era. Isolated places, leaning perilously, sometimes enveloped by wild nature, abandoned fragments, corners painted by the mastery of the palette of time, the same time that will decide their slow decay. A lived company that transforms itself and becomes a work of art, an unnoticed world, silent yet alive, soaked with ideas, dreams, sacrifices, and human effort, a fantastic and vibrant work of colors, lights, shadows, oxidized metals, worn bricks, walls tinted with precious earth, sometimes fallen, ceilings collapsed.

My personal tribute and all the passion to these monuments, symbols of a past that lives today in the guise of art."

Massimo Contran

Contran was born in 1970 and began painting as a self-taught artist at the age of thirteen, with a focus on landscape painting. After years dedicated to academic studies in Psychology and a corporate career, he rediscovered painting in 2004, delving into his personal technique through the study of painting and color treatises (Piva, De Chirico, Da Vinci, Cennini).

In 2009, after several exhibitions and publications, he devoted his hyperrealism to Industrial Archaeology, which embodies his passion for industrial history and art, developing a constantly evolving personal concept. He has exhibited in Venice, Florence, Rome, Lucca, Padua (his first solo exhibition), Berlin, and New York. In 2011, he was awarded the "Excellence in Style" prize in Palermo and his work has been featured in art magazines and catalogs.

Through industrial archaeology, he incorporates psychological concepts by placing objects and colors in abandoned industrial contexts that observe the viewer, encouraging them to reflect on themselves. The need to clothe industrial works with art intertwines with the transformation into a form of "mental environment" upon which elements of personal reflection are placed: a yellow barrel, a girl repeated multiple times, an Eiffel Tower with exaggerated and unnatural colors.

The critic Michael Musone writes about him: "Hyperreal and simultaneously surreal places, filtered through the soul that can achieve such stylistic finesse, possessing artistic sense in motion, that which the artist possesses. Contran is a painter on the rise, driven by intuition, by rigorous analysis that propels him to always go beyond, striving for additional milestones."