A practice between body and light.

Marco Monaldi is an Italian visual artist who grew up in the countryside around Petritoli, in the Marche region. Observation of the landscape and an early interest in drawing shaped his development. In 2000 he moved to Florence to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2005. His training with Viviana Cosci and engagement with Renaissance drawing informed a practice still grounded in anatomy, space and chiaroscuro.

From 2014 to 2016, he lived and worked in Brazil, first in Olinda and then Recife. Alongside exhibitions of his own work, he gained experience in gallery practice and curating. On returning to Italy, he opened New Spazio M-Arte in 2018, bringing artistic production, exhibitions and teaching into one space.

The human body and the relationship between light and shadow connect different phases of his work. Winged figures and still lifes reflect a sustained enquiry into physical presence, vulnerability and inward experience. From 2022 onwards, this enquiry expanded into new materials and approaches, including Broken Humanity and, in 2024, Michelangiolismo irreversibile, shown in dialogue with Adolfo De Carolis in Montefiore dell’Aso.

Alongside painting, Monaldi teaches drawing and painting. In 2026, he led drawing workshops at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone and began an editorial project with Treccani.

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The figure, translucent layers and pictorial matter become ways of exploring the relationship between form and inner life. Light is not merely a visual condition: it suggests the possibility of transformation.

The new project takes shape through preliminary studies on board, anticipating a pictorial research that will develop on paper.

Alongside his artistic practice, Marco Monaldi pursues a personal journey of introspection and spiritual exploration, in which meditation plays a meaningful role.

This inner dimension increasingly informs his painting, guiding it towards greater simplicity, lightness and luminosity. The human body, once primarily the subject of representation, also becomes a threshold between the material and the immaterial.

Light thus takes on not only a pictorial significance, but also a symbolic one: an expression of elevation, transformation and transcendence. This exploration remains open and continuously evolving.