Aldo Mondino: Surprise

Surprise exhibition project focuses on some specific aspects of Turin art scene between the 1960s and 1970s.After spending some time in Paris between 1959 and 1960 where he attended the Ecole du Louvre and William Heyter’s engraving courses,Aldo Mondino (1938-2005) made his first appearance as an artist in Turin in 1963 with a solo show at Il Punto gallery, where he shows the Anatomical Plates.

The works on display Sole and Immersore, both carried out in 1967, represent an anomalous experience within his artistic production, in those years revolving around game and humour.While Immersore can be rather linked, as Riccardo Passoni noted, to New Dada instances, that were then being discussed, Sole translates with the materials from neon signs a typical theme of landscape painting like dawn, incidentally, the same subject a prominent Pop Art master like Roy Lichtenstein was exploring between 1963 and 1964, an artist to whom Sperone devoted the opening exhibition of his gallery.

These two works share, besides the materials used, the fixed measures guiding their installation on the wall, 160 centimetres from the ground, marked by the artist with a label from Stein gallery on the back of Immersore. This imaginary line, going lengthwise across the work, defines a point below which the lights must be off and it corresponds both to the measure Masaccio theorised as the fixed height of human eye, and to the mark the Arno waters left on some masterpieces of Florentine art, that struckMondino to the point of making him create a series of works between the end of 1966 and 1967. Amongst these works, it is worth recalling his installation for the exhibition Con temp l’azione (Stein, Sperone and Il Punto galleries, Turin 1967), when the artist connected the chairs in the exhibition by drawing a red thread throughout the town placed at 160 centimetres from the ground.