Welcome to my website monorarts.com, from my artist name Monor (Franck Maunoury). I’m based in the city of the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans and the medieval Plantagenet town, less than 1 hour by TGV from Paris.
I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a child. A creative passion gradually developed. I believe that art elevates our humanity. To this day, my artistic work primarily explores the human, through portraits, nudes, scenes from contemporary life and significant events, both individual and collective. A recurring question guides my approach: What does it mean to be human today? After an initial period of neo-expressionist drawings and paintings, my current approach combines academicism and “minimalist realism”, in the words of New York art critic Joslin Van Arsdale (formerly of Christie’s, New York), who appraised my paintings on December 10, 2024. These pictorial creations are the fruit of a period of self-training, followed by six years of training in drawing, painting and art history at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, then at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Schlum School in Le Mans, completed by a year of intensive academic training in drawing and painting, based on the method of the Kiev Academy of Fine Arts. This solid technical base, enriched by my personal and professional experiences, enables me to explore the human soul, its thoughts and its existence in our contemporary context. In my future creations, I want to draw and paint the life of holobionts (humans, animals, plants, micro-organisms), a concept inspired by biological research that studies the interactions between an organism, its host and its environment.
By analogy, I question human relationship to himself, to his fellow human beings, to animals and plants, to his microcosm and, more broadly, to his macrocosm. Through my painting, I seek to capture reality as I perceive it. This quest requires a constant dialogue between art, science and philosophy. My academic background in mathematics, economics and the visual arts forms an important basis for furthering this research. But logic and knowledge are not enough: feeling and being moved are essential. When I paint, an intense emotional and physical connection arises from my creative process. Seeing a face emerge on canvas is a profoundly intense experience. The need to share this personal emotion so that it becomes collective is at the heart of my practice. Painting, with its mystical power and “divine” force, connects us to each other. This is why the life of the holobiont, in our contemporary context, remains the focus of my artistic research.
The original works, offered as one-offs, are available for sale directly on this site, or on request, and can be viewed at my studio in Le Mans by appointment (CONTACT menu). They are dated, signed and delivered with a certificate of authenticity.
