He was born in Milan on the 27th of May 1936. He lives and workes at Sesto S. Giovanni. Since he was a young boy, he has been feelinf the painting as an instinctive way to express himself. His father Cesar, a painter, sculptor and teacher at S. Marta School in Milan, initiated him in painting. He began his professional activity in 1965, participating in numerous national exhibitions and obtaining important recognitions and awares. He has prepared many personal exhibitions and partecipated in national reviews (at Sesto S. Giovanni, Zingonia, Legnago, Bergamo, Lavagna, in Milan). he has taken part in exhibitions organized by the gallery Gelrny, by the Cultural Centre "The Maniero" at legnago, by the gallery of Eustachi, by Manzoni of Cormano, by the Touristic Centre "Saint Teresa" al Legnago. Among the obtained prizes: the First Prize "Trophy Don Lisander" in the Extemporary of Cormano; the second Prize al the Faruffini Competition, the First Prize "The Resegone" in 1977, the First Absolute Prize "Epiphany" at the Gallery Eustachi. His paintings are exposed in different private collections in Italy, France, Germany and Japan.

It has been written:

"...More than to the school, Mella should be grateful for his artistic education to his father's teachings. Like him, he belongs, for the style, the aesthetic sense and composition, to the stream of figurative Lombard tradition with the variant of a greater ostentation and brightness of hues. He is less melancholy, but shining like a sunny day. In his paintings there is the exuberance that marks his physique and spirit. He is always in search of wonderful landscapes linked to the visive reality that he turns in their horizontal and vertical depths, for example some rows of roofs on the old houses which, unsfortunately, little by little, disappear. On the contrary whereas the charm of the Nature bursts in full blossom, the engagment of the artist, in realizing it, becomes extraordinary and emotional. All this is the consequence of the really felt and moulded sensations, but also of a remarkable ability in the combination of the colours: add an authentic chromatic explosion aiming at emphasizing the romanticism and the description of the places. To tell the truth, the composition, the pictorial stability and the brightness are the strong elements of Luigi Mella; moreover we have not to forget the sensibility and the richness in immagination. Sometimes the visive crossing seems to become the result of fantastic revelations. The painter expresses the irony for "clawn" figures and represents some vacant looks of human dimensions with caricatural grimace because they are drawn by aspects that are in and out of the reality...".

Giacomo Veglia Fazio

 

"...Luigi Mella's painting distinguishes itself by the passivity and still-life with a linear expression of lyricism, of adaptation to his painting-object. In his paintings we see a breeze of poetry, of simply sweetness lacking in exasperated tensions which rises from the colours and their mixture and goes in the bottom of the nature and things; his world is a material medley of sensations and emotions that skilfully turns on the picture. Mella is a "figurative" painter, linked to the Nature and substantially faithful to a direct vision of the reality..."

"...Even if Mella's pictorial realism represents the material thickness of the objective reality, in the shapes of the Art, it is always lyrical and suggestive. Some colours and a little surrealistic effects of the light let his landscapes present themselves to the sensibility of the observes like some trembling projections of moods intensely lived by the artist..."

Luigi Valerio

"...In the landscape, Luigi Mella has an immediate vision of the Nature seen with a participating mind, often with the tendency to represent real foreshortenings of a mountain world, for example "Sun on the baita". In this painting the research of a warm and moving light which surrounds the baita is revealed. We can see the warmly coloured plains. Under the snow there is an earth life. In the figure he is an artist rich in immagination, able to invent psychologically interesting women, with a demoniac vitality. Mella's painting is instinctive; in it we catch the passage from a realistic vision to a whimsical and poetic abandonment.

Marcianò