Galleria Enrico Astuni - Reggio Emilia
Aldo Mondino. Mazel Tov
13 December 1997 – 25 January 1998
Reggio Emilia, Enrico Astuni Gallery at the Chiostri di San Domenico and Synagogue
The crossings and transgressions into multiple places and cultural dimensions are the thread of Ariadne’s thread running through Aldo Mondino’s poetics. In this exhibition too (organised by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia in collaboration with the Enrico Astuni Gallery), spread across the four rooms of the Chiostri di San Domenico gallery and the ancient Synagogue, the path chosen by the artist through his recent work appears powerful and revealing. Aldo Mondino is the traveller, carrying with him the experiences of the great travellers of the 18th and 19th centuries, their anecdotal accounts, their travel notes, their memories. Mondino’s ‘Grand Tour’ is above all a curiosity about the East, which embodies, in a general sense, all the diversity and attractions that he translates into his works. The Arab theme emerged in him as early as the mid-1980s, when rabbis and sultans, dervishes and Andalusian bullfighters spoke different languages yet were so bound by a universal message as to be ideally enveloped in the vortex of a symbolic dance. His pictorial and sculptural solutions are symbolic and philosophical, in which the exotic theme is strongly intertwined with the sacred. Religion, understood above all as spirituality, as a drive towards the infinite, but also as the history of peoples, appears in its most rarefied form, less didactic yet precise in the artist’s analysis of ritual and prayer.
Dervisci, (s.d.).
olio su linoleum
Dervisci, (s.d.).
olio su linoleum
Dervisci, (s.d.).
olio su linoleum
Whirling Black, 1997
olio su linoleum
190 × 140 cm