Thomas Mainardis paintings are a hybrid of subjective impressions and pop culture images that evoke myriad moods, including eroticism, melancholy and deeply felt longing. His work, which he calls Pop Expressionism, often appropriates already extant pictures of women or well-known cultural figures.
Thomas adds layers of aesthetic resonance to the images, as well as his own motifs. He reveals the unspoken themes that inherently cling to our fantasies of sexuality and glamour. There is a darker realm beneath this glam imagery; Thomas’ paintings seem to besaying, as his work straddles the line between portrait and psychedelia.
Thomas has said that the work process of painting constitutes a privileged universe of the chromatic fields which move him. For Thomas, art is a necessary subversion of normative social constraints which enables him to access a liberated sensuality and an exploration of fantasy. The result, his work, is a realm in which a glance, a posture, or a situation disturbs and irresistibly draws the attention.