Aldo Mondino. Merci Satie
from 3 June 2026 to 30 September 2026
Bologna
Aldo Mondino. Merci Satie
Galleria de’ Foscherari is delighted to present, from Wednesday 3 June 2026, *Merci Satie*, a solo exhibition by Aldo Mondino dedicated to music, understood not merely as an iconographic theme, but as a field of resonance between image, object, word and movement.
The exhibition Merci Satie is conceived as a refined tribute to that invisible yet rock-solid thread linking Aldo Mondino’s visual universe to Erik Satie’s revolutionary musical intuitions, in a dialogue between two genuinely free spirits who knew how to use irony and paradox as their preferred tools for dismantling the rigid conventions of their respective eras. A tribute that is immediately apparent upon entering the exhibition space, where a series of drawings dedicated to Satie himself physically introduces the visitor to the exhibition. In Mercie Satie, Erik Satie is not presented as a mere biographical or musical reference, but rather as a true spiritual archetype, a master of the Parisian avant-garde and Symbolism with whom Mondino shares the same brilliant ability to conceal profound conceptual seriousness behind a screen of provocation and linguistic play.
And just as Satie built his score upon obsessive and repetitive patterns, so too does the hypnotic music unfold upon which the Dervishes dance, pure figures captured in the act of the Sema, the Sufi ritual dance. With one hand raised to the sky to receive grace and the other towards the earth to bestow it, these whirling dervishes dance to a cyclical musical structure, designed to reflect both the geometry of the dancers’ movements and the laws of the cosmos, mimicking the rotation of the planets around the sun and of electrons around the nucleus. A rituality that Mondino had thoroughly learnt during his travels in the East and which he decided to depict because those dancing monks, who become the very personification of music, represent for Mondino the painter’s own alter ego: an individual who spins on his own axis to achieve transcendence through an obsession with the gesture.
But Mondino’s exploration does not thrive on hypnotic repetition alone. As one moves through the exhibition space from one room to another, the obsessive rhythm of rotation undergoes a sudden deceleration, a shift in tone that leads the viewer out of the ritual trance and into a romantic idyll: at the centre of the route stands an iron bench on which two figures sit, leaning slightly towards one another, as if held in the moment preceding an intimate confidence. It is Viola d’amore, the bronze case of a viola worn by time, which lies open on its hinge, evoking the presence of two figures gathered in absorbed closeness. But there is no trace of the instrument; only the void of its form remains, the silent cavity of something that was once held within.
And facing that couple poised for confession, two orchid greenhouses frame the two figures in an olfactory and visual dimension that evokes the scent and warmth of those exotic flowers.
Placed mirror-like opposite one another, the works transform the exhibition space into a synaesthetic chamber, where music merges with nature, synthesising into an idyllic bucolic landscape in which Western high culture – Baroque music, symbolically represented by the viola case – is reflected and intertwined with the exotic elsewhere – the orchids of the East.
The profound connection between the musician and the painter is thus revealed: just as, on a musical level, Satie dismantles the traditional dramatic-narrative structure of typical 19th-century symphonic pieces, erasing bar lines and interlocking sequences of identical notes and fixed chords that do not change key, transforming the music into a geometric loop that freezes time, so Aldo Mondino applies this same rejection to the history of art and European modernism. His persistent need to experiment with concrete, everyday materials – such as chocolate, sweets, coffee, bronze, flowers, ceramics, glass and pigments – is not the whim of an indecisive artist, but the ability to open a personal and free dialogue with the art and craftsmanship of every era. A stylistic inconsistency that becomes a courageous form of artistic choice, a conscious decision which, just like Satie’s circular music, seems to oppose the idea of art directed towards a uniform and shared modernity, restoring to the artist the freedom to traverse the beautiful and the grotesque, the real and the visionary, in which his multifaceted output appears as an unceasing quest, an intimate and personal dialogue with the transformations of the world that were silently taking shape around him.
The exhibition Merci Satie is conceived as a refined tribute to that invisible yet rock-solid thread linking Aldo Mondino’s visual universe to Erik Satie’s revolutionary musical intuitions, in a dialogue between two genuinely free spirits who knew how to use irony and paradox as their preferred tools for dismantling the rigid conventions of their respective eras. A tribute that is immediately apparent upon entering the exhibition space, where a series of drawings dedicated to Satie himself physically introduces the visitor to the exhibition. In Mercie Satie, Erik Satie is not presented as a mere biographical or musical reference, but rather as a true spiritual archetype, a master of the Parisian avant-garde and Symbolism with whom Mondino shares the same brilliant ability to conceal profound conceptual seriousness behind a screen of provocation and linguistic play.
And just as Satie built his score upon obsessive and repetitive patterns, so too does the hypnotic music unfold upon which the Dervishes dance, pure figures captured in the act of the Sema, the Sufi ritual dance. With one hand raised to the sky to receive grace and the other towards the earth to bestow it, these whirling dervishes dance to a cyclical musical structure, designed to reflect both the geometry of the dancers’ movements and the laws of the cosmos, mimicking the rotation of the planets around the sun and of electrons around the nucleus. A rituality that Mondino had thoroughly learnt during his travels in the East and which he decided to depict because those dancing monks, who become the very personification of music, represent for Mondino the painter’s own alter ego: an individual who spins on his own axis to achieve transcendence through an obsession with the gesture.
But Mondino’s exploration does not thrive on hypnotic repetition alone. As one moves through the exhibition space from one room to another, the obsessive rhythm of rotation undergoes a sudden deceleration, a shift in tone that leads the viewer out of the ritual trance and into a romantic idyll: at the centre of the route stands an iron bench on which two figures sit, leaning slightly towards one another, as if held in the moment preceding an intimate confidence. It is Viola d’amore, the bronze case of a viola worn by time, which lies open on its hinge, evoking the presence of two figures gathered in absorbed closeness. But there is no trace of the instrument; only the void of its form remains, the silent cavity of something that was once held within.
And facing that couple poised for confession, two orchid greenhouses frame the two figures in an olfactory and visual dimension that evokes the scent and warmth of those exotic flowers.
Placed mirror-like opposite one another, the works transform the exhibition space into a synaesthetic chamber, where music merges with nature, synthesising into an idyllic bucolic landscape in which Western high culture – Baroque music, symbolically represented by the viola case – is reflected and intertwined with the exotic elsewhere – the orchids of the East.
The profound connection between the musician and the painter is thus revealed: just as, on a musical level, Satie dismantles the traditional dramatic-narrative structure of typical 19th-century symphonic pieces, erasing bar lines and interlocking sequences of identical notes and fixed chords that do not change key, transforming the music into a geometric loop that freezes time, so Aldo Mondino applies this same rejection to the history of art and European modernism. His persistent need to experiment with concrete, everyday materials – such as chocolate, sweets, coffee, bronze, flowers, ceramics, glass and pigments – is not the whim of an indecisive artist, but the ability to open a personal and free dialogue with the art and craftsmanship of every era. A stylistic inconsistency that becomes a courageous form of artistic choice, a conscious decision which, just like Satie’s circular music, seems to oppose the idea of art directed towards a uniform and shared modernity, restoring to the artist the freedom to traverse the beautiful and the grotesque, the real and the visionary, in which his multifaceted output appears as an unceasing quest, an intimate and personal dialogue with the transformations of the world that were silently taking shape around him.
Aldo Mondino. Merci Satie
Serra, 2004
olio su linoleum, vetro e ceramica
198 × 130 cm
Viola d'amore, 1985
bronzo
160 × 110 × 45 cm
Merci Satie, (s.d.).
tecnica mista su carta
Serra, 2004
olio su linoleum, vetro e ceramica
198 × 130 cm
Turcata, 2004
olio su linoleum
190 × 140 cm
Opere correlate
Nessuna opera correlata trovata