Silent presences, camouflaged figures in the rooms, contemporary profiles that reproduce the ancient faces of paintings and sculptures: visitors are the real protagonists of the exhibition "Museum Effect. Instant Intrusions in Places of Art", which Massimo Pacifico will present at MANN from 31 October 2019 to January 6, 2020.

About fifty photographs, taken in the most important cultural institutes in the world, will represent a real act of love for the public of the Museums: a postmodern Grand Tour, thanks to which it will be possible to understand how much art resembles real life.

Many are the destinations of Massimo Pacifico's creative journey: to name just a few, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the British Museum, Tate Britain and Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Villa Stuck in Munich and Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Uffizi, Bargello and Gallerie dell'Accademia of Florence, Pinacoteca di Brera and Museo del Novecento in Milan; there will, of course, be the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and the Museum and Real Bosco di Capodimonte.

"Not infrequently I cross majestic thresholds, and I photograph, and a lot. With open apertures and shutter speeds, as far as technology allows, short. I claim to freeze unrepeatable moments and to produce simple images, using an elementary vocabulary. I try, in the manner of Henry Cartier-Bresson, to align the lens with the eye and the heart ... and also with that part of the brain where irony is rooted ", comments Massimo Pacifico, who, in recent months, presented his exhibition at “Marino Marini” Museum of Florence.

Thus, in rooms 94 and 95 of the Archeologico, visitors will "mirror" themselves in the images of Pacifico: it will be easy to smile for the cheerfulness of a mother who improvises dance moves with her little son at the Victoria & Albert Museum, recognizing oneself in the concentration of two girls at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam while, beside them, a child improvises an escape, mingling in the austere suspension of an elderly Londoner projected into the chivalrous subject of a canvas.

Museums, places of life, therefore, where a couple exchange glances of understanding between the masterpieces and the red shirts of the young people interrupt the white of the busts fixed on a wall; museums metaphorical spaces of the unexpected, in which real life and life of art are intertwined in a game of symmetries and dystonia framed by the photos.

“The public is at the center of the debate on museum management: understanding trends, identifying and profiling users, strategies to improve the performance of cultural institutions in terms of heritage enhancement. Behind these terms, albeit so important for museum management, who can we see? They are men, women, boys and children, captured by Massimo Pacifico's lens: personal stories that meet the universal history expressed by art, to reveal symmetries and contrasts between our lives and those of the peoples of the past ", says the Director of the MANN, Paolo Giulierini.