| ALDO MONDINO |
you can also see the exhibition and the works on ARTSY | |
| quadri quadrettati |
Exhibition 2018 | |
| 11 march – 19 april 2022 | Catalog |
Against this backdrop, which was in search of possible paths, Aldo Mondino took painting backwards, to the Codici Miniati, galleria Alpha in Venice, the tavole Anatomiche at the galleria il punto in Turin, directed by Gian Enzo Sperone, and in 1964 Quadri a Quadretti, or Quadrettature; the letter was nothing short of a risposte, starting from scratch from the most simple, elementary things. A return to school, to classification, to exercises: a starting point for the new art. Mondino seemed to be saying that it was necessary to start over from drawing and from illustration, in which painting and drawing coincide, going so far as to make a pop interpretation of the Maternità by Casorati, a classic 20th century artist who was also from Turin. At the La Salita gallery in Rome, his Quadri a Quadretti feature the typical subjects of drawing classes, from aeroplane to the young artists (il pittore, 1963), a sort of primer in which painting starts from drawing, goes back to being “elementary”, like a deja vu of the learning process. These paintings are very ironic, vibrant, far from the cold apathy of Andy Warhol’s “Do it yourself” works from the same period. Behind his linguistic games, on notes of magrittian paradox of a kind of painting that plays with words; but at the same time one can also make out the unconscious, made light-hearted, but always on the verge of chaos and disarray. Mondino adapts the reality of art to witty mottoes, he elevates it to a sense of humor that had always been the sole prerogative of literature. Valerio Dehò, Mondino. Mode d’Emploi | ||
This is the young Turin native, Aldo Mondino, who uses pop art templates, filling them with his own brand of ingenuous, colorful, playful cheerfulness, so much so that he completely overturns them. In his case, the use of a banal template […] was indispensable in order to erase every trace of the surrealist-style “pictoricism” seen in his early works as an artist […] and obliterate every scrap of sentimentalism from the picture. Mondino carefully draws his little squares. […] Sometimes he attaches a watercolor palette or a box of pencils to the panel of painted Masonite: a Dadaist, rather than Neo-dadaist gestures, because the object glued onto the painting does not enter the painting; it is the final touch of the “didactic” parody enacted by Mondino, who thus intends to invite the visitor to help himself to crayons and watercolor in order to “complete” the work, to perhaps concludes the fun scholastic farce with happenings. Cesare Vivaldi, exhibition catalog, galleria La salita, 1964. | ||
Mondino aims at wit rather than comedy. Fun and games, of course, but also a confident taste in the image, a warning to start from scratch, to rediscover the scattered fragments of the visual machine. Tracing out square after square, filling cell after cell. […] Mondino’s courage lies in choosing this childish, playful iconography, this pastime for tired crossword enthusiasts. The use of childish games in this painting doesn’t mean that painting is an easy business, a puerile occupation: quite the opposite. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, exhibition catalog, Studio Marconi, 1966 | ||
AVAILABLE WORKS
Aldo Mondino. Quadri quadrettati was last modified: March 11th, 2022 by