Massimo Zanchi (b. 1953, Turin, Italy) starts painting very young.
His first personal exhibition is held in 1971.
His juvenile works are strongly influenced by the works of the artists of the historical surrealistic movement.
Around the end of the 1970s he leaves the surrealistic phase to arrive at images joining oneiric reminiscences to the ones typical of the lyric abstractionism.
In the ’80s his artistic research moves towards an abstract expression with geometrical characteristics but with the permanence of ‘signs’ freely affixed and almost dictated by a sort of ‘automatism’ of surreal memory.
The next phase is characterized by paintings tending to the informal and to a gestural expressiveness that transforms the ‘signs’ into thick chromatic tangles.
From the second half of the ’80s to the first years of the ’90s Massimo Zanchi’s works are enriched by naturalistic elements which move his themes towards a figuration still affected by abstract influences.
The ’90s mark a turning point. Massimo Zanchi’s painting becomes figurative, although soaked in conceptual and metaphysical facets, where the represented objects, though recognizable, are deprived of the real life functionality. It is the period of the ‘Interiors’ which soon turn into thematic ‘Rooms’: the ‘Painting Rooms’, the ‘Shadows and Mirrors Rooms’, the ‘Writing Rooms’, all lived by exorbitant objects, foreign and indifferent to the surroundings and by disquieting shadows. There often appear, as windows or pictures in the pictures, traces of urban landscapes and quotations from and homage to artists from various periods loved by the author.