Carlo Massimo Franchi was born in Pavia in 1961. Adopted by Novara as his home, he graduated from the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he met the maestro Salvatore Fiume and became his student. Fiume’s influence is reflected in his early works: the cycle of Mediterranean Women — sensual female figures with soft curves set in orientalist atmospheres — which became his first recognisable stylistic signature.

With over 30 years of career and more than 200 solo exhibitions across Italy and the United States, Franchi has built a path of constant evolution, moving from figurative art to a refined and singular conceptual expression, now recognised as Futurist Conceptual Hybrid Art.

Over the years, his visual language has been enriched through several creative phases: social themes connected to water and nature, the Aggregazioni series on human relationships, and the Bridge and Tower series inspired by the energies of great international metropolises. Alongside this, his talent for cross-pollination and set design has led him to unite Art and Architecture, creating commissioned environments that place him firmly within the field of Interior Design.

The mature synthesis of his entire research bears the name Kaleidos: a term that fuses “Kalos” (from the Greek for beautiful) and “kaleidoscope”, an instrument of fragments and light capable of generating endlessly new images. The Kaleidos are anthropological conglomerates in which matter, colour, form, words, and anonymous human profiles merge into a single powerful and distinctive visual language — not only painting, but also sculpture, set design, and design objects that transform fabric into a three-dimensional expressive medium.

His works are exhibited in international galleries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, with a show at the Paul Getty Museum in Santa Monica. In Italy he has exhibited at the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo, the Regional Museum of Natural Sciences in Turin, and in solo shows in Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Turin, and Novara. His output includes commissions from the Middle East to the Sultan of Brunei, with a presence in the Italian pavilion at Index Dubai. In 2000, he took part in the exhibition “Auto e Forme” at Villa Borghese alongside Pininfarina, Zagato, and Giugiaro.

Carlo Massimo Franchi lives and works in Novara, where he continues his research with a gaze always turned towards the horizon: embracing technology, contemporary society, and the infinite expressive possibilities of an art that never ceases to evolve.