SAD: You persistently emphasize the conflict. Even when it is not there, you create it yourself. Both as a man and a painter you are a typical representative of the “autonomic obedience”, in contrast to the “heteronomic”, which means that you have no respect for other people’s opinion, have you?
PM: I like everything that hampers me. It gives pleasure to me to break rules, taboos – to go through a red light. I don’t want to be obedient. I want conflict, challenge, I want to decide by myself.
SAD: The whole of your painting is a pictorial representation of internal conflicts – a contour with a surface, yellow with red, a figure with a chaotic space…
PM: I look for a pure drawing in some paintings, only the background should be neutral. The conflict should grow and resound directly from the drawing.
SAD: What unites oppositions in your paintings is the unity of space. You have no background on which the ‘forms’ lie. Everything melts into a single conglomerate.
PM: I strive that there should be light as a backbone to support the painting.
SAD: The third dimension does not live a real life in your paintings. Even your mosaics lack it. You respect painter’s laws and the integrity of painting. I have even an impression that you emphasize surface – your paintings are “flat”.
PM: The mosaics I have seen have no third dimension either, they do not need any depth. It does not excite me. I am a modern painter.
SAD: You belong to the painters of PASSION, of the exalted, Dionysian and eudaemonistic experience of the world, brought into connection with the term “aggressive painting” – real painting. How much does passion mean to you? Can it be dosed or directed?
PM: Each human being has his own temperature and spring. Some people have small springs which dry up quickly. Some have abundant, raging springs. If you repress the temperature or the spring you get an artificial, false outcome. I take my passion to the point of explosion. Without it my painting would die out.
SAD: What is it in your painting which, in spite of the many periods and expressions, remains permanent, constant? To what have you remained consistent? What is that thing from which you cannot run away?
PM: I am a completely disorderly person. There is no organization in me. I let myself go to time, to feelings. But when my friends analyse me they say that, in spite of the impression of disorganization, there is still a system in me, firmness. Some special sense which guides me, gives me directions. Nevertheless, I could not run away from my feelings.
SAD: I have noticed that all your paintings, from the first one to the last, are guided by the energy of passion. It is conspicuously present all the time.
PM: The twentieth century is harsh, I cannot paint romance. The time imposes upon me that energy, strength, that level of passion which have grown into me.
SAD: Let us summarize: you create art which you strongly experience while you paint. You exhaust yourself physically, too; each stroke means both a pouring out and materialization of your energy, a transformation of biological energy and internal vibrations into painting matter. Does colour (matter) have a magical, symbolic or any other significance for you?
PM: I do not consciously tend toward a symbolism of colours. I use red, or yellow, quite spontaneously. When I feel it is not resonant enough (like the tone in music) I continue to search for the adequate sound of the pigment.
SAD: So you approach colour in an artistic manner, phenomenologically. But why do you most often paint with red and black?
PM: I don’t know if I use red most, but I love it. I have no theoretical explanation about which and what kind of colours I use. When I look at the colours on the canvas, I take that colour which calls me most persistently.
SAD: The more I look at your paintings the more a thought of Man Ray’s comes to me: “Works of art should not be estimated by their artistic qualities, but by their power to surprise, to disturb, to make things mysterious, to entertain and to make us think.”
PM: I like that thought. The picture, the artistic is included in the work, but the pictorial quality is not of primary importance. The work of art should move, challenge, touch. If it challenges you, then it calls you to war, to a dialogue.