Aldo Mondino: Mondino in colour

CAMeC Centre of Modern and Contemporary Art presents Mondino in colour. The painting from the beginnings to the linoleum, a retrospective which covers the whole of Aldo Mondino’s painting production.

The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of La Spezia and produced by the CAMeC Centre of Modern and Contemporary Art from a scientific project of the Aldo Mondino Archive.

This exhibition can be seen as a counterpart to the exhibition Aldo Mondino the sculptor (Pietrasanta, 2010), concentrating this time on painting, a natural, special medium for the town of la Spezia which has hosted the Premio del Golfo, one of the most important 20th-century painting awards.

Aldo Mondino always thought and lived as a painter. His “shortsightedness” in relation to realism over the years became a means for getting to know the world in his own particular way, without ever perpetuating a repetitive style. At the beginning of the ‘60s with him the barriers between painting and conceptual art had already disappeared, indeed nobody has ever managed to imprison his work inside a precise definition.

In his early career in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, at the height of the crisis of Informal Art, the young Mondino was drawn to a gestural surrealism, hectic and populated with signs and images recalling the works of Matta, Lam and Tancredi. He studied etching in Paris under Stanley William Hayter, in whose atelier Picasso, Chagall, Giacometti, Pollock and many other great artists of the time also worked. After this he perfected his knowledge of the mosaic with Severini, because technique for him was a rule to be first understood, then reinvented with original solutions. Over the years his idea of graphics becoming painting and vice versa took him in a unique direction. He did not wish to annul painting but to renew it, even though he absorbed the post-Informal crisis. Within the artistic environment of the time he tried to understand the many trends which were opening up to the social, economic and cultural changes of those fast-moving years crowded with men and ideas.

The CAMeC presents 40 or so works on canvas, paper and linoleum, done from 1961 to 2000 and all coming from the Aldo Mondino Archive and a selected group of lenders. From his early paintings, passing through the “Squared paper pictures” and the fake etchings, we arrive at the linoleum works which made the artist popular also with the public at large. The appearance of this support in the 1980s derived from an obsession with graphics, linked to the idea of colour and the pictorial sign. Linoleum, a very important material for etching techniques, was used by Mondino as a support for some famous series of paintings such as the “Dervishes” or the “Jews”. Apart from the play on words implicit in the etymology of the term “linoleum” (linseed oil/oil on linen), the artist was also fascinated by the large variety of colours and textures in a simple, industrial material, as was also the case for Eraclit, the “poor” wood of the workshops on which he painted his equally famous “Carpets.” The exhibition itinerary also includes a work from the CAMeC collections: Longships, ca. 1980, mixed technique on canvas, 25 x 35 cm, Cozzani collection.
 

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