Italy - ALDO MONDINO

Hedonistic and abstruse, Mondino’s painting combines Aristotle’s dual possibility of art as form in itself or for itself and as form mixed with matter. Matter in the sense of exoticism and the culture of diversity. The representation is never symbolic or solemn. From this culture he accepts the lowering of depth and the love of news stories. This is where the artist finds his pleasure. The possibility of starting from the detail of the gesture or the figure, far from any exemplary attitude or desire to capture the absolute. Matter has no absolute. At the most there is transformation through form. This is the task of art. Its very essence. So Mondino, shut up in his atelier, paints the traces of a real or imaginary journey. It doesn’t matter. If there is a result, it’s always the same. Positively obligatory. It aims to restore the figure and at the same time divest it of its clothing, viewed from a phenomenonological standpoint in an appearance or a gesture.

Then memory intervenes. The memory of art, which has unlearned by heart what it has seen in order to transform it. The creative journey, like the real one, produces a family of pictures, related to one another for their style and packaging, drawing and painting. The relationship can be identified in a number of invariant elements, in the presence of a black and a red, never violent but almost commenting on the representation.

Text by Achille Bonito Oliva