Mai Thai Moncalieri

Thai flavours on the walls — a full interior treatment for Mai Thai in Moncalieri.

This interior mural was created by artist Neve in May 2025 at Mai Thai, Moncalieri, Turin.

A complete interior environment for the Mai Thai restaurant in Moncalieri — a city immediately south of Turin — continuing Neve's ongoing collaboration with the Mai Thai Thai restaurant chain across multiple locations in the Turin area. As with the Rivoli and Via Mazzini locations, the work treats the restaurant interior as a total space: all visible walls carry painted imagery drawn from the iconographic tradition of Thailand and Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia. The dominant element is a Naga — the great serpent of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology — rendered at monumental scale on the back wall of the dining room. The Naga's head fills the composition: an enormous face with open jaws, vast scales rendered individually in silver-grey, dark and modelled with precision, the mass of the creature pressing forward into the room. Above the head, the Naga's crown — a golden crest of curving forms, elaborate and ornate — catches the restaurant's Edison bulb light and glows against the dark ground. In Thai iconography, the Naga is the guardian of water and threshold: it lives at the boundary between worlds, protects temples, and conducts the rains that feed the earth. To enter a space guarded by a Naga is to pass under its protection. Around the room, the other walls are distributed between three visual registers: The coiling body of the Naga — scales continuing from the head, the great serpent twisting into the left wall, the physical mass of the creature extending through the room. The Garuda — the divine bird of Hindu and Buddhist tradition, the vehicle of Vishnu, the cosmic adversary and cosmic complement of the Naga. Rendered in the same silver-grey as the Naga but with the structure of armoured wings and body, the Garuda occupies the right-hand wall section between windows. In Thai religion and iconography, Naga and Garuda are eternal opposites: sky and water, fire and cool, the powers that balance each other and together constitute the whole. Sak Yant sacred diagrams — the geometric inscriptions of Theravada Buddhist devotional practice — appear across the walls in gold, rendered in the same precise manner as across the other Mai Thai locations. These are the binding inscriptions of protection, the geometric prayers that sanctify the space. On the far right wall: an abstract element in gold — a flame or spray of feathers — that completes the circuit of the room. Small traditional Thai lacquered figurines — a dancer, a devotional figure — are placed on shelves above the painted walls, integrating three-dimensional objects into the painted environment. The room is unified by its palette: dark charcoal grey as the universal ground, silver for the creatures, gold for the sacred details, crimson for the accent wall, warm wood tones for the coffered ceiling painted between the beams. The Edison pendant lights are integrated into the composition as the light source that animates the gold.