MONS

Within the contemporary landscape of hybridization, Maurizio Montoneri (known artistically as MONS) operates less as a traditional author and more as an aesthetic “device”: a catalyst of languages that channels music, graphics, installation, and video into a single experiential grammar. His trajectory is consistent with an openly multidisciplinary vocation. Performer of sound and DJ, creator of soundtracks for radio and television, gallerist, and visual artist, MONS has for years constructed a lexicon born from the short circuit between word and music, between humanistic culture and electronic culture.

This tension toward a “plural form” is already evident in his activity as a cultural promoter. The founding and direction of a space such as Mons Art Stage—conceived as a multidisciplinary platform for contemporary artists—makes it clear that, for MONS, art is never merely an object, but a context, a form of direction, a relationship. In other words, he does not simply produce works; he produces conditions of fruition, with a structural sobriety that renders the imaginative and visionary component even more incisive.

On the musical front, the practice of mixing—understood not as an accessory technique but as a true poetics—takes the form of atmospheric montage and citation. MONS works as an editor of sound, selecting, cutting, layering, and refining until a sensory narrative emerges. In this sense, the collaborations with Julian Lennon in the Mix Delirium – Merry-Go-Round series are emblematic: here musical mash-up intertwines with readings and textual elements, reinforcing the idea that music can function as a vehicle for literature and imagination rather than as mere accompaniment.

MONS’ presence in contexts that foster dialogue between image and word—such as his encounters with Ferdinando Scianna at the Hermann Hesse Foundation—further completes the picture. In these situations, live music does not “comment” on photography but rather passes through it, acting as an emotional counter-shot that amplifies the density of vision. Where Scianna constructs an ethics of the gaze and of memory, MONS introduces a contemporary vibration, an acoustic breath that relocates the image firmly in the present.

On a visual level, his graphic works focused on animals—often traced back to a Bauhaus-inspired style—can be read as exercises in rigorous and “cruel” synthesis. The animal is neither decoration nor facile allegory, but a primary form, an essential sign, a creature rendered iconic. Here MONS appears to practice a discipline of the eye (which, in his own biographical narrative, also passes through an encounter with the aesthetics of fashion and high design), arriving at a controlled, geometric figuration in which emotion erupts precisely because it is contained.

Within this framework stands the solo exhibition MONS TROSITIES, whose title already declares its intent: a phonetic and conceptual play between “MONS” and “monstrosities,” understood not as gratuitous horror but as the genealogy of inner creatures emerging from an imagination that favors ambiguity over consolation. The exhibition, scheduled at Galleria Il Forte Arte in Via Santo Spirito 7, Milan, is conceived as a compendium of his multiform practice. Rooms transform into immersive environments—between marine waters and fearsome forests of fire traversed in first-person perspective—alongside graphic works on aluminum and a continuous musical soundscape diffused throughout the gallery, turning the visit into an act of passage rather than simple observation. Ultimately, the key point is not merely the variety of media, but their internal coherence. MONS works like a director who thinks in terms of sequences, thresholds, and transitions. Music constructs depth and temporality; graphics define icons and “species”; video triggers perceptual vertigo; and the environment binds everything into a unified experience. MONS TROSITIES thus presents itself not as a retrospective, but as a declaration of method: art as an ecosystem, in which the creatures generated by visionary imagination do not ask to be explained, but to be inhabited.