Franco Minei is sitting, relaxed, on a velvet green couch in his plush Manhattan apartment on the Upper West Side, his gaze affixed at nothing in particular.There’s no music, no noise. To anyone walking in, it looks as if he is a man indifferent to his environment. In fact he is at work. He is strolling past sensuous women, locked gates, deep green woods, torrent seas, secret gardens, fires and dark skies. In this world Minei is creating a story filled with hope and desolation, redemption and betrayal, where magic and mystery embrace. And

when he is finished he will translate it by brush, pastel, pen and ink. “I look at the wall that’s my real job,” he half-jokes. “Strangely enough I usually start with a title and after that comes some of the elements, people or an object, then I see the correlation. The New York City apartment walls are a gallery of luminous landscapes scattered with melancholic, wistful, disconnected figures. Its characters are dominated by the poetical representation of life, where direction can purposely go off course. “I am a
romantic who is betrayed,” he declares. Minei calls his work “Magic Realism.”

    The great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, collected Minei’s paintings. They found a common
bond, a fascination with the satirical; circuses, clowns, traveling acts and a happy boyhood. Once, after one particularly successful show in Rome, a critic cited Minei’s surrealistic social commentary as on par with Picasso and Chagall.  Four decades later, Minei is going through a renaissance of sorts. For most of his career, he has worked on large canvasses, but in the past five years he’s turned to pastel.  

“Sometimes it takes a specter of sad sweetness to show the human condition there is always a satirical view of life or an irony,"says Minei, a founder of the New Roman School of art.”
--- excerpt from Prestige Magazine 2009