Artists' portfolio: Aldo Mondino, the taste for paradox

In each of his works, with each of his gestures, as well as in his fantastic representations, throughout his forty-year artistic career, Aldo Mondino (Turin, 1938 - 2005) has always managed to surprise us. “His game is a complex one – wrote the critic Alberto Fiz nethe 2002 essay "The Paradox of Painting" – where the conventions of art are continually challenged. [...] The artist wonders about the hidden meaning of the image by grasping its unconscious nature, without renouncing an authentically decorative representation based on the idea that Henry Matisse had of decoration and which Western painting has often denied. No exceptions to fashions, no conceptual temptation, no need to adhere to an aesthetic model, but a mental journey that passes through canvas, brushes and linoleum. [...] But it is good not to forget the basic element that underlies all of Mondino's research: the paradox. [...] Everything slips into another dimension, aimed at capturing the multiple aspect of the image according to the path opened by Dadaism and Surrealism”.

Mondino was undoubtedly one of the greatest representatives of post-war Italian art. "But his belonging to the artistic scenario of those years - he writes Gwendolyn Belli presenting an exhibition at the Galleria Colossi in Brescia in 2008 – presents itself as an absolute and uncontrollable, inseausta heterodoxy of language, which refuses to adhere to the dogmas of qualbe a coeval artistic current. Stia those of Arte Povera, Minimalism and art kinetic-programmed than from those of the neo-avant-gardes (New Realism, New Dada and Pop) to develop a new artistic language that is expressed, over the years, in various fields: from painting to installations, from sculptures by Candies (1968) to mosaic, made with Chocolates Peyrano produced in Turin, to arrive at using the most heterogeneous materials, such as the portraits of Giorgio De Chirico or the Western Wall in sugar, the Babel tower painted by Bruegel, but made with packages of nougat in 1968 at the Arco d'Alibert of Rome, the linoleum, theheraclites, but also ceramics, glass, marble and bronze (Violet of Love, Lobby Star from the 80s) in clear contrast with the materials used in poor art. Mondino was a citizen of the world, an irreverent contemporary dandy (he appeared on the cover of Vogue in a velvet smoking jacket), in his artistic choices as in life. His soul was more inclined to absorb, instead of the influence of the rising star of New York Pop Art, the suggestions of the Ville Lumière, where Braque and Picasso gave rise to cubism and where the exhibitions of the surrealists Magritte and Masson, during the first trip to Paris (1959-1961) as well as a horizon of cultural suggestions that expands from the coasts of the Mediterranean to India.

Already in the 1959 he moved to Paris, in search of new stimuli, tired of the Mannerist results of the latest informal painting, where he attended courses Heyter atAstelier 17 and atSchool du Louvre, in addition to the mosaic course at the academy with Severini and his assistant Licata as masters. His first source of inspiration is Matta, for the mixture of abstraction and science fiction suggestions that lead him to create works of surrealist inspiration, later exhibited at the Galleria L'Immagine of his friend Antonio Carena; upon his return to Italy in 1961, Enrico Crispolti presents his Anatomical tables, bodies distorted by surreal surgical operations, painted on masonite, on the occasion of a personal exhibition at the Galleria Il Punto directed by Gian Enzo Sperone in 1963. The Quadrettature are the direct evolution of these works and the first detachment (only aesthetic) from surrealism. In 1964 he exhibited at Sperone those that rework the emblematic image of Motherhood with eggs di Casorati appropriating it with a rolloversemantic in the title Don't step on the eggs!, and, subsequently, those with other subjects at the Galleria La Salita in Rome (L'Airplane, The Budding painter, The Snake, The Goalkeeper). The Squares they are a regression to the infantile level of drawing-book painting, a sardonic and playful reflection on a conceptual level on his tools and on the aesthetic construction of the subject, already in a postmodern, anarchic key, but without the nihilistic fury and iconocal of the avant-garde of the traditional means of art, painting and sculpture, to which he has always been linked. The irony, the calembour, the semantic paradox conducted on a verbal level make Mondino a worthy heir of theAcademy du Derisory, as well as Magritte's linguistic cages and logical mismatches; the Turin artist transforms art into a sort of "playful parody of itself", between representation and linguistic game that overturns its meaning, a double game, also on the duplicity of the image, which remember that of a friend Boetti, to whom he dedicated a series of works. A double game which, maintaining the pictorial sign as subject-object of the representation, is resumed, abandoning the coolnessconceptual of Squares, at the end of the years Sixty-early seventies, in the series of Scales,Falls and balloons, exhibited at the Stein Gallery in Turin in 1965. The aim is to transform painting into a physical experience, using paint as a primary material, like wood, neon, straw or the leathers of contemporary Arte Povera. In Scales an apparent geometric abstract stability is disturbed by a brushstroke. In Falls, the paint does not stick on the plastic square applied by the artist on the canvas, on which the color slides, as the geometric arrangement of the squares within the squares of Clyfford Still transmuting into a three-dimensional stairway (Ladder, 1966) or how the color scheme of Joseph Albers is overturned in some parts (Still Life, 1965-1966). Other times Mondino "can" overturn the plastic rectangle that he applies, where the pictorial sign does not attack, in a coloristic composition of signs that reproduce (in a mirror image, in the constant "double game") the same shape (It can,1968). THE balloons instead they drag the pictorial elements upwards, into another dimension, an alternative to the traditional space of the visual framing of the canvas.

This also leads him to reflect on the limited field of vision offered by perspective Renaissance, where the point of view was placed at eye level, 160 cm from the ground, the same level reached by the water level of the Arno during the flood in Florence, the same to which the artist places the red thread that crosses the streets of Turin, connecting the Sperone gallery, the Stein Gallery and Il Punto in Turin, in the 1966 installation; the same height below which the 900 bulbs of the rays arranged on the wall of the Sun of the Stein Gallery (1967) and of thedimmer(1967) of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, are turned off, demonstrating the blindness and narrowness of the paradigms with which reality is reconstructed on a two-dimensional surface. As Albert claims Fiz: "Art is a hallucination that has the appearance of reality, an optical reflection that contemplates fiction as its essence". Here then is that the iconography of Babel tower di Bruegel it can be recreated with an everyday dessert such as nougat and brought back to a "home dimension"; the geographical map of the course of the Danube from the Black Forest to the sea can be reconstructed with a mosaic of chocolates Peyrano from papers of infinite chromatic nuances (Danaublau, 2000, not surprisingly exhibited in 2001 at the Gallery Linding of Nuremberg and, in 2003, on the occasion of an important retrospective at the Mar of Ravenna, Aldological), as well as Byzantine monuments (The Byzantine World, 1999, exhibited by Gian Enzo Sperone, in New York), the bullfighters and other works exhibited at Mediterranea and at the Gallerie Artscope of Brussels.

The aleatory and ephemeral component of Mondino's work of art overcomes the illusory aspect of the forms of representation, forcing us to question ourselves on the hidden meaning of the image in a research path where the conventions of art are continually questioned through visual blunders and denied optical perspectives that undermine the "aura" of the eternal work of art: the tesserae of his new mosaic are not made of marble or bronze like those of Byzantine mosaics, but are chocolates, sugar cubes, coffee beans.

Here then that, after the Roman stay in the house above the Trevi Fountain which leads him to create the series of King(1969) and to close the avant-garde experience by exhibiting his fish surrounded by real blood at the Arco d'Alibert of Rome, on the occasion of the exhibition fish farm (1969), in the most relaxing climate of Liguria, i False Collagesof 1973; these are homages to historic cubism by Grey, Braque and Picasso, compositions of squares of color painted on canvas and apparently applied to it with material brushstrokes of color, which already contained hints of the scores of the musical compositions of 1975-1976. The instruments were born from the observation of the great masters in the museums during their second extended stay in Paris (1972-1980) and from the idea of ​​recomposing what Cubism had broken up in anticipation of a new, renewed order. At the Venice Biennale in 1976, he exhibited The four quatour à ropes, born from a philological parallelism between his painting and the compositions of Schoenberg. It is always a dyscrasia of vision that leads us to distance ourselves from the representation of the things of the world where the faces can be outlined with sugar, where the chocolate paper recalls the bronze flashes of the mosaic, as well as the transparent plastic of the Bic placed in the chandelier JugenStylus, exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 1993, recalls the glittering decorations of the Jugendstilof the early twentieth century, in a perennial visual slip.

During his stay in Paris, studying the subject of the Eiffel Tower, Mondino discovers that he can paint by decomposing the subject into strokes, intervening with light-colored brushstrokes on a layer of dark color that is subtracted, with a technique that recalls the bold strokes of engraving German Expressionist, by Kirchner. Thus was born the series of Eiffel Tower revisited in a constructivist key as a sort of tower Tatlin, exhibited at Museum d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1977 on the occasion of the exhibition mythologies daily which is followed by the series of woods of broken trees at the top, Wood-cut (1980), also made with a technique reminiscent of woodcut (in English woodcut), as well as the series of clapping hands (Applause), exhibited at Studio De Ambrogi of Milan in 1981, the series of Angels (also exhibited in Milan in 1983), the large pink sea rippled with black waves (Sunset, 1980) and the series dedicated to adults shipwrecked of history (longship, 1980). In this perpetuated deception of vision, where the pictorial language cites that of engraving as a parody, Mondino feels "free to invent" (new forms, as he claims Fiz) without making use of the citationism so loved by contemporary Transavantgarde in Italy and Neo-expressionism in Germany.

Therefore, the discovery of a new medium as a support dates back to the early eighties, linoleum, with which to open a free dialogue, a continuous interference between the pictorial gesture and the industrial print that acts as an active support determining the flattening of the color field and integrating the image of new coloristic vitality. Thus Mondino's painting, polycentric and ambiguous, thrives on contaminations between visual and linguistic elements, as well as aesthetic ones and created by the interference between two different expressive mediums; just think about the Carpets hanging of the late 80s who recreate, through painting, the textures of oriental carpets, found while walking by chance in a Souk of Tangier, on a fireproof chipboard used in industry, theheraclites or drummed, in ainedited marriage of technique and material. As the nineteenth-century painters had already done, Mondino too, like Delacroix, opens up to the suggestions of the oriental world, with the first trip to Morocco, in the second half of the 80s. The last picture painted before leaving Milan and going to Morocco had a bucolic subject, Millet et a night, a blue flock painted in oil on a gold background, a reference to the spiritualist nineteenth-century realism of the praying peasants of Millet, but cloaked in oriental suggestions, as the title suggests, the usual calembour that recalls the tale of A thousand and one nights.

In the 90s, his travels led him to expand his cultural landscape from North African countries, such as Morocco, where he fell in love with the colorful variety of colors and scents of the souk and their merchants, repeatedly painted in oil on linoleum in their dazzling colours, from Palestine, where he rediscovers the religious foundations of his Jewish origins and a parallelism between the intensity of prayer and painting in a conceptual way, making fun of the usual paradoxes on the tradition of Schekitah with red bloodstains and on food rules and mottos (Mazeltovof the Jewish tradition.

While traveling in Turkey he falls in love with the whirling dance of the dervishes a Konya, to which he dedicates numerous series of works, characterized by white robes on brightly colored linoleum backgrounds. Going into ecstasy i Dervishesthey pray. Painting their dance is like praying through paint, just like the North African musicians of the brotherhood of Gnawa met at El Fnaa the tightrope dancers of the Dance of Jarres, with their stacked jars poised on the head, metaphorically represent "an extension of the spinal column, a sort of encounter with the dinosaurs, or a man's barycentre towards the head", as Mondino stated, in the constant search for a transversal perspective for interpret the world in new cultures.

In these series of works that represent them, Mondino gives life to a dynamic composition of shapes from which emerge the white of the dervishes' clothes or the variety of the headdresses of the Gnawa.

Turkey is also a source of inspiration for the portraits of 36 sultans who lived between 1200 and 1920 and exhibited by Sperone Westwater in New York in 1990 and at the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, while the real Whirling Dervishes were presented at the Venice Biennale in 1993, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. From his collection of autographed manuscripts by writers, musicians and painters, the idea of ​​the portraits (Delacroix, Ingres, Satie, Mozart), made with almost monochrome solutions, such as the busts. At the end of the 90s, the exhibitions at the Foundation followed one another Darkness of Milan, Chicago, Geneva, Paris, Vienna and London.

Passing by Essaouria in Jerusalem, from the sultans to the orthodox Jews, Mondino's journey between exoticism and memory superimposes the compositional elements of the image, aided by the decisive and marked pictorial line in a pun visual without limits, nor ideological and temporal boundaries, in perpetual upheaval, always ready to absorb new suggestions and hybridizations; let's think about when he opened up to sculpture by realizing Initiation, conceived in 1969, on the occasion of the exhibition fish farm (but shot as sculpture in 1988 and after), the fish from the Egyptian Book of the Dead walking on man's limbs Giacometti, Torso Torso, a three hundred kg bust, the portrait of Duchamp, the Boccioni's mother with two bowling balls instead of breasts. In 2000 a trip to India, to Calcutta and Benares leads him to be fascinated by the flower market with its merchants, subjects of the works Flovers exposed to Birla Academy of Calcutta. In 2003 will be the merchants of Cappadocia, in the beloved Istanbul, to be in the center of Merchant Gallery which come from the same goods he used as pictorial material: carpets in heraclites, fish, chocolates to get to Mexico and the passion for the Spanish tradition of bullfighting from which he draws the epic image of the bullfighter as a "metaphor of the artist, the man who knows how to dominate fear with gestures of great beauty", immortalized in a famous series of ceramics, the Bullfightingsystem. (Gwendolyn beautiful)

Aldo Mondino dies in Turin, on March 10, 2005.

Activities exhibition

The meeting with Gian Enzo Sperone, director of the Galleria Il Punto, is fundamental for his artistic career, with the exhibition of the Anatomical Tables, a series characterized by tables on masonite. Important personal exhibitions are also presented at the Stein Gallery in Turin, the Marconi Studio in Milan, the La Salita Gallery in Rome, the Galleria Swamp of Turin. The group show at the Arco d' dates back to his stay in RomeAlibert, in 1968, then at the Galleria Torre in Turin. In 1969, again at the Arco d'Alibert, With the ' fish farm shows real fish with blood. His work Holy shit, presented in Rome after being exhibited in a gallery in Brescia, is confiscated and Mondino comes sentenced to pay a fine for blasphemy. In 1972 he returned to Paris, waiting for his painting to be re-evaluated. Mondino works in Paris from the end of 1973 to the whole of 1980; this commitment materialized in his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1976. The exhibition dates back to 1977 mythologies daily al Museum d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The series of the Eiffel Towers, also in the Parisian period, with titles such as Le Tout Near War, is mainly made with the engraving technique. In 1980 you held two exhibitions at the Galleria La Salita in Rome and at the Gallery Flinkers Paris. In 1981 and 1983 he made two solo shows at Studio De Ambrogi from Milan. Between 1984 and 1985, by Franz Swamp, holds two exhibitions. He approaches oriental suggestions as a western artist, as did the painters of the XNUMXth century, for example Eugène Delacroix. Fascinated by oriental culture, presented in 1990 by Sperone Westwater in New York a series that "portrays" thirty-six sultans who all lived between 1200 and 1920. Followed by, among others, the exhibition at the Fondazione Darkness of Milan, in Chicago, Geneva, Paris, Vienna, London. The creation of overlapping carpets in wall compositions, with bright colors and made on, also belongs to the Orientalist sphere heraclites, an industrial material used in construction. In 1993, at the Venice Biennale curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, in a personal room he presented a series of large paintings representing dervishes in the act of dancing; on that occasion, authentic dervishes danced in front of the audience. In 1999 you exhibited at the Marconi Gallery in Milan for the Foundation Maimeri a series of drawings and sculptures on the theme of dance: Arabesque. Two important exhibitions in Milan at the 1000eventi Gallery and one in Rome at the Sperone Gallery entitled The Byzantine world. A common feature of these exhibitions is that they only used chocolates made especially by Peyrano, in Turin. In 2000 he made his first trip to India and created an exhibition entitled Flovers to the Birla Academy of Calcutta. At the turn of 2000 and 2001 Santo ficara presents a first retrospective of Mondino in Florence. In 2001 the Nuremberg gallery Linding in Swamp sets up a small but significant exhibition of his works. Among all, to remember Danaublau, a 6-metre square made up of 2000 chocolates. Although his health began to waver, in 2003 he exhibited at the Galleria Carlina in Turin, where a series of glass sculptures made directly in Murano are exhibited. In the same year, the anthology entitled Aldological which brings together the works of the last forty years. A heart attack took him away in 2005. Two years later, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna organized the Mondo Mondino anthology. Since then, numerous retrospectives dedicated to this great artist have followed one another, whose works still radiate their expressive power today: Globeby Victoria Coen, at the Gallery of Modern Art of the Republic of San Marino e Mondo world. The artistic universe of Aldo Mondinoby Mark Senaldi, at the Villa delle Rose in Bologna, both in 2007, Trample the Eggs!by Albert Fiz, at the Palazzo del Monferrato in Alessandria, in 2008, New Anthology, edited by Mattia and Denise Tosetti in Milan, in 2011, and, last but not least, Aldo Mondino. Modern, post-modern, contemporary, at the Museum of Villa Croce and the Palazzo della Meridiana in Genoa, in 2016. In February 2018 The Santo gallery ficara, which has followed the work of Aldo Mondino for many years, and the Il Ponte gallery, which over the years has gathered an important nucleus of works created between 1963 and 1964, have staged a beautiful double solo show in collaboration with the Aldo Mondino Archive.

His works have entered the permanent collections of the most important national and international museums and in numerous public and private collections (dal Museum of Tokyo, at Gallery Heik Curtze of Vienna).   

Transfer market

Versatile artist, refined, ironic, appreciated in life, after his death in 2005, for some years his quotations have traveled to survival levels. Just as Italian art was beginning its ascent on an international level. Works of poor quality and, in some cases of dubious origin, have invaded the market, generating a climate of distrust. While the 'historical' and quality works remained firmly in the hands of a few important collectors, many, too many, ended up in auctions where they went unsold or changed hands for ridiculous sums. Suffice it to say that from two thousand to today – second Artprice – almost 1400 works by the artist, in various typologies, went up for auction, mainly in Italy. The work of the archive and especially that of some galleries has slowly improved the situation and since 2015 the Mondino market has reversed course. The release in 2017 of the first volume of the general catalogue, edited by Ilaria Bonacossa and Valerio Deho, put a fixed point on the artist's production, was a further added value that boosted the quotations of the eclectic Maestro. So much so that in 2017 the turnover recorded in the increasingly international auctions was 318 thousand dollars and in November 2018 it exceeded 584 thousand dollars. According to the index Artprice $100 invested in a Mondino work in 2000 is now worth $495.

Gallery: Isabella Bortolozzi gallery, based in Berlin ( www.bortolozzi.com   ), is the new reference chosen by the Archive ofartist for the management of the Aldo Mondino market. His works however they can be found in leading Italian and foreign galleries such as Tega e Bonelli of Milan, the Bridge and Santo ficara of Florence who have recently dedicated important personal exhibitions to him.

Pricing: currently the artist's production in the gallery has prices included in a range in price ranging from 5-7 thousand to over 100 thousand depending on the type, date of construction and quality of the work. The works with chocolates and small and medium-sized painted ceramic tiles require an investment of between 35 and 60 thousand euros, which can reach 100 thousand and more for the series of Carpets hanging . The historic works from the 60s are highly sought after by collectors and, depending on their size, can well exceed €100.

TOP price in it: hanging carpets, 1989,acrylic/compressed chip board (in 2 ) measuring 250 x 100 cm was sold for 78.203 euros (including royalties), more than double the estimate from Christie's in London in October 2018.