Aldo Mondino. Linoleum
from 13 February 2019 to 22 March 2019 - from 3 April 2019 to 17 May 2019
Milano - Londra
Aldo Mondino. Linoleum
In painting, the use of linoleum is highly unusual. Yet Mondino chose this medium, struck by the sign of a Milanese flooring retailer just a stone’s throw from the artist’s studio, then in Via dell’Orso, for its wealth of formal and symbolic eccentricities. This discovery marked the artistic maturity of Mondino, who had been a prolific and idiosyncratic innovator on the European scene for decades. Whilst, on the one hand, linoleum presented itself as a highly worked surface, with references to the Orientalism that captivated Mondino during those years of artistic wandering, on the other it was seen as an irresistible opportunity for yet another play on words, this time on ‘lino’ and ‘oil’, the two materials most commonly associated with the Western painting tradition. The formal structure of these works represents the epitome of Mondino’s relentless experimentation; throughout his career, he repeatedly questioned the stability of symbolic and formal elements, both in his own work and in that of his contemporaries, both Italian and foreign. Enrico Crispolti states, with great foresight, in the catalogue of a solo exhibition held in 1963 at the Il Punto gallery in Turin, that in Mondino’s work “symbols and emblems have lost their abstract nature as ideological themes to become concrete organic elements.” Furthermore, as became clearer in Mondino’s artistic development, the role of the symbolic is always imbued with humour and irony, verging on the nonsensical only to be redeemed by an extremely intelligent arrangement of individual formal elements.
ALDO MONDINO. LINOLEUM
3 April – 17 May 2019
Matteo Lampertico - Arte Antica e Moderna
Via Montebello, 30, 20121 Milan
Galleria Gracis
Piazza Castello, 16, 20121 Milan
13 February – 22 March 2019
M&L Fine Art
15 Old Bond Street, London
Matteo Lampertico - Website
ALDO MONDINO. LINOLEUM
3 April – 17 May 2019
Matteo Lampertico - Arte Antica e Moderna
Via Montebello, 30, 20121 Milan
Galleria Gracis
Piazza Castello, 16, 20121 Milan
13 February – 22 March 2019
M&L Fine Art
15 Old Bond Street, London
Matteo Lampertico - Website
"DIPINGO PER DISTRARMI DA ME STESSO" - Gian Enzo Sperone
In fact, Luigi Pirandello had said, “I write and study to distract myself from myself”.
Aldo Mondino, a refined and obsessive collector of autographs from which he drew quotations and with which he had filled the dining room in his Monferrato home, had slipped in the word “I paint”.
Double meanings, ambiguities and puns were his daily bread, for he thrived on contradictions. The dance of the demons of art intertwined with the ghosts of a turbulent life stirs those who, like him, lived in a constant state of double adolescence, just as the meanings of his paintings were double. Thus, the resulting turmoil and excesses are not episodic occurrences, but generate salvific antibodies in the bearer’s psyche.
Aldo Mondino, who knew a thing or two about the demons of art and life, had in fact relived in his later years an adolescent exuberance with an optimism designed to be out of control. He often failed to contain life within practicable and sustainable boundaries; yet this allowed him to alleviate the pains of art at a time when the tyranny of Conceptualism, Minimalism, Arte Povera and the like left painters with little hope. Thus, a painter not particularly in tune with his time was able to endure the pain of isolation and of working in a very narrow niche.
In those years he painted provocatively on linoleum (the worst surface for oil painting), squeezing the tubes of paint in long strands directly onto the surface; this allowed a man, in whose studio there was no palette, to give his brushes time to ‘reflect’ a little before doing their work. At the time, in a friendly spat with Michelangelo Pistoletto over the brazenness of mirrors, he had paraphrased Jean Cocteau (of whom he owned several autographs) with the dazzling adage: “Mirrors should think a little before they reflect”.
It was by no means easy to spend years painting rabbis, Hasidic hat-makers, North African acrobats, dancers with jars on their heads, dervishes in the vortex of mystical ecstasy, Spanish Moros y Cristianos, in the era of Marcuse and Lacan, and to the rhythms punctuated by walks fuelled by alcohol. Having returned to Turin from his first stay in Paris in 1962, in the pre-pop era (the American wave would sweep across European shores from 1963 onwards) and at odds with an industrialist father who, disappointed by his betrayal, would oppose him for 25 years, he was in search of new allies. The Italian pioneers who had picked up on the change were, first and foremost, Ettore Sottsass (with a timely article in Domus in 1962) and Michelangelo Pistoletto, who were already in tune with the new demands of a gaze turned insistently outwards, after decades of tormented and tormenting inward gazes (heart and guts). These were existential and linguistic positions aimed at redefining the boundaries—first geometric, then informal—of the dominant art.
Only Fontana, Burri and Manzoni held their course with a strong, unprecedented and therefore revolutionary aesthetic: they would survive years of upheavals and counter-upheavals.
The milieu Mondino had instead frequented in Paris was the Post-Surrealist and New Dada scene (where the epic of Yves Klein, Arman and Tinguely would suddenly unfold), where Jean-Jacques Lebel, an iconoclastic artist close to the Living Theatre and Gilles Deleuze, held sway; not entirely in harmony with the extremism of Pierre Restany, who was committed to codifying Nouveau Réalisme as a staunch defence against the Americans. There was also Robert Lebel (Jean-Jacques’s father), Breton’s ‘advisor’ and the foremost interpreter of Marcel Duchamp, alongside his Italian counterpart Arturo Schwarz, the temperamental scholar and dealer of Surrealism in its entirety.
This is to give an idea of the “circles” frequented by the young Jewish man from Turin who had been posted to Paris. In this regard, it should be noted that Aldo had never set foot in a synagogue, even though from the mid-1980s onwards he would populate his paintings with rabbis and Jewish intellectuals.
The first exhibition worth mentioning in this regard is the one held in Rome in 1988 (Galleria Due C). In 1990, at the exhibition in New York (Sperone Westwater Gallery) featuring chocolate sculptures and a coffee-bean carpet with beans of varying roasts and shades of colour, paintings with sugar cubes, and numerous paintings of rabbis and Ottoman sultans, Julian Schnabel and Woody Allen had turned up (the latter surely by chance). The carpet was trampled by a distracted visitor on the opening day (fortunately, Lavazza had supplied a stock of coffee beans). Julian Schnabel, on the other hand, was a friend of his, and would dedicate a large painting to him, created on the day of his death. One painting was purchased by Barbara Guggenheim, perhaps for Sylvester Stallone.
A painting depicting an ichthyodrome with bloodied fish in an unlikely speed race (executed in faux mosaic) aroused great curiosity and went to a Californian collector.
On that occasion, he painted a self-portrait in Brooklyn featuring the rabbi of Williamsburg and a crow on the ground.
He had gone to Williamsburg to try to meet the community’s rabbi, who was reputed to be a holy man and rather destitute.
The painter, who delighted in paradoxes by painting ironic rebuses, cultivated his (dandyish) independence by wallowing in the endless broth of double entendres. “Sculpture, my foot!” first executed in chocolate and then in majolica, was a stacking of little elephants like those made of imitation ivory sold by street vendors. The portrait of Lord Byron bore an imposing frame-band of real Ballpoint pens.
The pun was a hook to grab our attention, and since excess is part and parcel of the intellectual provocateur’s toolkit, he made ample use of it.
In Turin in 1963, he had befriended the master of ‘evasion’, Giulio Paolini, whose art, though perfectly cool, was nonetheless as far removed as possible from a linguistic perspective. Instead, he associated with Michelangelo Pistoletto, the father of anti-expressionist and photographic painting, whose brilliant intuition he admired: surfaces that were not pictorial but reflective.
His first significant achievement was the series of “anatomical charts” from 1962–1963, painted in an expressionless, poster-like style: a novelty for the time and one that linked him in some way to Roman Pop Art. At the 1963 Michetti Painting Prize in Francavilla a Mare, he had exhibited a large panel similar to those seen at driving schools, used to regulate right of way at junctions. The painting had not been to the liking of the politician-painter Amintore Fanfani, one of the exhibition’s patrons, who found it insubstantial. It fell to me to undertake the thankless task of explaining (clumsily) the reasons behind the painting to a gentleman who was by no means unworldly and possessed the quick-witted, cutting wit typical of the people of Arezzo.
Aldo Mondino could not bring himself to engage in theoretical discussions and left it to the critics to settle issues that could not be settled.
His daily practice of painting did not tolerate interference, and despite generous doses of alcohol, he never lost the naturalness of his brushwork or the clarity of his vision. In Rome during the 1970s, he had met a brilliant Neapolitan logician and mathematician, Leo Aloisio, who honoured us all—artists and gallery owners alike—with his attention.
He pointed out to Aldo that if one could translate typical moments of conversation into equations, we would discover that for every 10% of information exchange, there was 90% of pleasantries and conventions: so it is in painting and in art in general. Aldo could not have agreed more.
Fifteen years after his untimely death, one wonders how much of a certain dandyism inherent in the belated rediscovery of his Jewish origins, and how much of a tormented obsession with the future of painting, remains underlying in his art.
Following Matisse’s prophecy: “Easel painting is over”, a debate began, one that remains unresolved. What is certain is that we are dealing with a painter-sculptor of great linguistic independence – and more besides. In the late 1960s, whilst student marches in blue jeans and coats – a blend of guerrilla and urban protest – were rampant, Mondino, though chronically short of funds, never ceased to wear impeccably tailored jackets and designer shoes. Those who have the strength to ignore trends of all kinds, in the end, if they have talent (and he had talent to spare), become a trend in their own right. Changing the rules and going against history requires a character far from the ordinary.
Aldo Mondino. Linoleum
Copertina del catalogo della mostra
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