GM Some of your photos seem particularly accurate with regard to the composition of the image, of the light and shade, others, instead, seem to follow the logic of the visual Ready Made, that is photos that offer the viewer a direct and immediate contact with reality, perhaps showing little effects of estrangement, but leaving the merely visual values on the background, is it that so?

MM Form and content are inseparable. My research is not directly concerned with technical or stylistic problems because the objective is the quality of the creative and re-creative process. I want to reveal the dialectics of the real. All this emerges in some of my works. For example in “Tema” (“Theme”) I propose perspectives framing the floor area under beds and furniture. The image almost turns into a heritage of a child’s hide-out. Instead in “Untitled (mole)” I show a shot of this underground inhabitant of my garden, almost a symbol of the underground artist silently operating in search of his own roots.

GM I have been particularly struck by your re-visitation of the idea of a light box obtained by replacing neon lights with tanning lamps. What did you want to underline with this variation.

MM This is a large-size self-portrait where I wished to give back to the work a participatory dimension in relation to the ambient and to the viewers who, to observe it, are forced to get tanned. In this case I think of artist as Dan Graham, Dan Flavin or Bruce Nauman. Thus the sublimation of the image in a transcendental sense is opposed to pure idiocy, the portrait, even if of a large-size, draws back to the background, the place becames the protagonist and the viewer participates in a ceremonial.

GM You have operated on photographic images also through photomontages made through computer modifications. Which particular creative path have you followed to come to a work centred in the manipulation of the image?

MM Sometimes I seek and experiment with a linguistic swerve through a technical escamotage. As it occurs in “Senza offesa” (“No Offence”) : in this case a record cover shows Rubinstein, the pianist, bowing after a concert. I rotated the central part of this image producing a semantic “full turn”. The image contains and highlights the idea of rotation, an abstract component, but generated by a pretext. Also in the work “Anch’essi” (“Them too”) I used a very common and over-used process: the specular duplication and reflection. But operating these technical solutions on this particular subject (a painting by Millet) resulted in a particular drift of sense.