Born in Naples in 1955, Claudio Massini is a contemporary Italian painter who now lives and works in Treviso.

After studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, Massini began his artistic practice in the 1970s through conceptual and performance-based work, engaging directly with the social and urban fabric of the city. This early involvement with lived experience and everyday reality laid the foundations for a practice that would later shift toward painting, without abandoning its conceptual rigor.

From the late 1980s onward, Massini gradually developed a highly specific painterly language, which he has pursued with remarkable consistency ever since. His paintings revolve around deliberately colloquial objects : vessels, garlands, flowers, goblets, architectural fragments, maritime forms, drawn from domestic and vernacular contexts. Familiar yet detached from context, these forms assert a symbolic presence without illustration, narration, or fixed interpretation.

Massini describes his work as “meta-historical”: a practice that operates outside linear time and stylistic movements. Built through slow, precise gestures on densely worked surfaces combining matte and lacquered textures, the works assert painting as a sustained, disciplined act rather than a vehicle for commentary.

Massini’s work has been presented in institutional and gallery contexts, including ‘Ambiente come sociale’ at the Venice Biennale (1976), Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples (1989), the Revoltella Museum, Trieste (1994), the Rupertinum, Salzburg (2000), the Modern Art Gallery of Bologna (2003), the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (2005), and Galerie Chloé Perrin, Paris (2023).