Mario Picardo

Born in France, Mario Picardo lives and works in Paris. A painter and draughtsman trained in semiology, he draws on American painting, 1990s popular culture and the urban environment. Always equipped with his phone, he records food packaging, abandoned objects, toys, cartoons and other fleeting signs, building a personal library of forms. This practice is rooted in childhood memories of his father, a house painter, whose truck became a mobile studio and taught him to optimise, recycle and transform materials. In the studio, Picardo turns his visual harvest into large canvases, drawings and patchworks, combining vivid colour with construction materials such as polyurethane. Photography and painting remain inseparable in a practice driven by the pleasure of making and a sharp reading of the present.