Aldo Mondino / Corrado Bonomi. Il doppio senso dell'ironia
from 15 June 2008 to 13 July 2008
Finale Ligure (SV)
Aldo Mondino / Corrado Bonomi. Il doppio senso dell'ironia
There are artists who do not fixate, who drift, who float on the meaning of things, playing with it. Marcel Duchamp, for example. This exhibition represents one of the possible outcomes of the ‘drift’ initiated by the man who made art more fluid and open, definitively intertwining it with the world of whimsical ideas, witty remarks, humour and witticisms which, in modernity, represent the rise of a more agile popular culture at the expense of the pompous pomposity of academicism.
The encounter between Aldo Mondino and Corrado Bonomi confirms how this way of making art can harness the heuristic powers of irony and humour, transforming them into tools for approaching the substance of things: where the simple phenomenon (the elementary fact of consciousness relating to reality) becomes an epiphany (illumination and a tear in the Veil of Maja), thanks to art used as an ‘anomaly’, as a corrosive agent directed against age-old rules perceived as obsolete, by generations of artists who must grapple with the modern world. Just as Socrates or Harlequin do, two “masks” at the origin of modernity. For “modern” is to dance upon the things of the world, knowing that truth does not blind but offers itself like a rag cast upon the ground, like the abandoned fold of a vanished vestal virgin’s robe. In a secularised and secular world, where “God is dead” from an overdose of talk shows and reality TV, Mondino and Bonomi provide an answer, within the “limits” of their comic talent: because their works must “entertain” in order to work. To entertain in the sense of “turning elsewhere, distancing, diverting”, leading astray, onto other paths, less trodden, perhaps “interrupted”, as Martin Heidegger intended: paths that lose themselves in the clearing of being and which, precisely because they lead nowhere, represent the vital essence of thought, where the question and the suspension of meaning do not signify an absence but a close encounter, however intangible, with a further meaning, a new model of meaning that art is called upon to offer. The works of Mondino and Bonomi function as signposts diverting us towards realms where ideas are no longer themselves, where the word can be used, thanks to a crossword-puzzler’s wit, as a lock-pick with which to pick (subtly and without giving it away) the locks of certain hidden places.
Once again, Duchamp is the source: what more caustic example than a work such as L.H.O.O.Q., Leonardo’s Mona Lisa reimagined with a beard and moustache (a sublime expression of childish instinct!), with a provocative title that, when read, sounds like: “elle a chaud au cul”. It is polysemy, this arcane ‘confusion of meanings’ that stirs in primitive minds, that appeals to moderns. Tired of having to study the organ of perception and sated with the positivist koine, which in the nineteenth century decreed that only that which can be tested experimentally is knowable, moderns wish to probe the meanderings of the poetic word and artistic vision; to savour their delights, their riches from an exotic world, their freedom from the wild prairie (Mondino would undertake tireless journeys to the East). They wish to photograph dust and produce Grandi Vetri, to play with chance and roam through the boldest conceptual realms. Above all, they wish to throw open the doors of art to the world. Such a desire reaches our artists who, free from ideological dogmatism, hoard materials to use in their works: Mondino paints on coconut mats or sculpts with sweets, Bonomi reproduces fish inside sardine tins or creates ‘Castles in the Air’ with cotton wool. For them, unlike their Arte Povera counterparts, painting is not taboo. The concept lives and thrives in the joyful colours and playful titles of their works. Worthy successors to a painter who was quickly loved and soon forgotten, but above all misunderstood, such as Giambattista Tiepolo: boundlessly “cheerful”, to the point of vacuity, yet profoundly serious in his judgement of the world, thanks in part to that “sprezzatura” which pervades much of his art. Like this, the works of Mondino and Bonomi may also appear “harmless” to those accustomed to the ponderous pontifications of art, yet they generate new synapses in those who look closely and allow themselves to be carried to where the work leads them.
In one of his parodies, Woody Allen imagines the adventures of a dentist Van Gogh, grappling with crooked dentures and bizarre X-rays: alongside him, the entire elite of Impressionist painting is transformed into a motley crew of comical characters busy drilling and filling. The result is amusing: Van Gogh loses money and clients as a dentist, but the results of his work earn him admirers in the art world. “I should have listened to my dad,” he concludes, “and become a painter; it’s not exciting, but at least it’s a normal life.” Allen’s ploy is laughable, but the “moral” is serious: the modern artist can even “be a dentist”, if the useless denture he produces is a work of art.
Mondino and Bonomi do not stop at the denture and flesh out conceptualism by using every useful tool, without prejudice, and giving figuration a leading role. An original approach. For them, painting is far from obsolete or incapable of embodying the concept. In this, their evolution takes things even further, where the modern-style reconnection with tradition unleashes new potential: for by reassuring the public eye (which is the first censor), they better reach the mind, seducing it and drawing it into the realm of an Italian-style conceptualism, macaronic, playful and not far removed from pop echoes, espoused by Munari and Pascali, by Boetti and Mondino, and of which Bonomi represents a survival, all the more intense as his work takes on intimate tones, made up of personal relationships with reality that resolve into an art that is almost unarmed, weakened, welcoming. Whilst Mondino embraces and echoes the allure of the dandy—a figure also dear to the early Schifano—bringing into his life the rhythms, wiles and stereotypes associated with the success of a ‘man of the world’, Bonomi conceives of an art whose mechanisms serve as a cradle for that ‘inner child’ of Pascolian conception that we all carry within us until the end: a sort of hard core whose voice is inaudible in the adult world, but which can make itself heard thanks to the enigmatic nature of meaning and the play of interpretations developed through a ‘warm’ and delicate conceptualism, vibrant with irony and wit.
We can appreciate these works to the extent that we allow the child within us to judge them, rather than the adult we are. In this instinctively conceived split of the Subject, planes intersect, meanings shift and polarities cross: perception is affected and art can have its unsettling effect, playful and serious at the same time. Even moving. If this happens, evocations and suggestions do not remain merely what they are but acquire the substance of reasoning within a logic other than the rational one.
Art, like myth, language and all knowledge, are ‘symbols’, wrote Ernst Cassirer in one of his famous works, ‘not insofar as they designate, in the form of an image or an allegory that alludes to and explains, a reality at hand, but insofar as each brings forth from itself its own world of meaning’. And this is what Mondino and Bonomi do, nurturing a “world of meaning of their own” with works that aim for a subjective, personal and intimate conceptualism (another difference from their “grandfather” Marcel), capable of carving out a path of communication within abandoned corners of the mind, where another logic prevails: that of the child or the primitive. Where the toy soldiers, fairies and toy trains used by Bonomi, or the chocolates and sugar used by Mondino, shine magnificently as only the true flesh of art can. This transfiguration of real matter into symbolic matter is due to the artist’s real, and not feigned, weakness. His inability to structure ideologies becomes his strength. The conceptual and emotional tricks he devises take the viewer back to the zero degree of knowledge. Nietzsche writes in *The Gay Science*: ‘Since I grew tired of seeking, I have learnt to find’. Mondino and Bonomi have managed to do just this: consciously devise a strategy to find witticisms, quips, mot d’esprit and jeu des mots which, for the romantic aesthetic, represent the best of thought, the strength of the spirit that discerns fragments of truth.
The encounter between Aldo Mondino and Corrado Bonomi confirms how this way of making art can harness the heuristic powers of irony and humour, transforming them into tools for approaching the substance of things: where the simple phenomenon (the elementary fact of consciousness relating to reality) becomes an epiphany (illumination and a tear in the Veil of Maja), thanks to art used as an ‘anomaly’, as a corrosive agent directed against age-old rules perceived as obsolete, by generations of artists who must grapple with the modern world. Just as Socrates or Harlequin do, two “masks” at the origin of modernity. For “modern” is to dance upon the things of the world, knowing that truth does not blind but offers itself like a rag cast upon the ground, like the abandoned fold of a vanished vestal virgin’s robe. In a secularised and secular world, where “God is dead” from an overdose of talk shows and reality TV, Mondino and Bonomi provide an answer, within the “limits” of their comic talent: because their works must “entertain” in order to work. To entertain in the sense of “turning elsewhere, distancing, diverting”, leading astray, onto other paths, less trodden, perhaps “interrupted”, as Martin Heidegger intended: paths that lose themselves in the clearing of being and which, precisely because they lead nowhere, represent the vital essence of thought, where the question and the suspension of meaning do not signify an absence but a close encounter, however intangible, with a further meaning, a new model of meaning that art is called upon to offer. The works of Mondino and Bonomi function as signposts diverting us towards realms where ideas are no longer themselves, where the word can be used, thanks to a crossword-puzzler’s wit, as a lock-pick with which to pick (subtly and without giving it away) the locks of certain hidden places.
Once again, Duchamp is the source: what more caustic example than a work such as L.H.O.O.Q., Leonardo’s Mona Lisa reimagined with a beard and moustache (a sublime expression of childish instinct!), with a provocative title that, when read, sounds like: “elle a chaud au cul”. It is polysemy, this arcane ‘confusion of meanings’ that stirs in primitive minds, that appeals to moderns. Tired of having to study the organ of perception and sated with the positivist koine, which in the nineteenth century decreed that only that which can be tested experimentally is knowable, moderns wish to probe the meanderings of the poetic word and artistic vision; to savour their delights, their riches from an exotic world, their freedom from the wild prairie (Mondino would undertake tireless journeys to the East). They wish to photograph dust and produce Grandi Vetri, to play with chance and roam through the boldest conceptual realms. Above all, they wish to throw open the doors of art to the world. Such a desire reaches our artists who, free from ideological dogmatism, hoard materials to use in their works: Mondino paints on coconut mats or sculpts with sweets, Bonomi reproduces fish inside sardine tins or creates ‘Castles in the Air’ with cotton wool. For them, unlike their Arte Povera counterparts, painting is not taboo. The concept lives and thrives in the joyful colours and playful titles of their works. Worthy successors to a painter who was quickly loved and soon forgotten, but above all misunderstood, such as Giambattista Tiepolo: boundlessly “cheerful”, to the point of vacuity, yet profoundly serious in his judgement of the world, thanks in part to that “sprezzatura” which pervades much of his art. Like this, the works of Mondino and Bonomi may also appear “harmless” to those accustomed to the ponderous pontifications of art, yet they generate new synapses in those who look closely and allow themselves to be carried to where the work leads them.
In one of his parodies, Woody Allen imagines the adventures of a dentist Van Gogh, grappling with crooked dentures and bizarre X-rays: alongside him, the entire elite of Impressionist painting is transformed into a motley crew of comical characters busy drilling and filling. The result is amusing: Van Gogh loses money and clients as a dentist, but the results of his work earn him admirers in the art world. “I should have listened to my dad,” he concludes, “and become a painter; it’s not exciting, but at least it’s a normal life.” Allen’s ploy is laughable, but the “moral” is serious: the modern artist can even “be a dentist”, if the useless denture he produces is a work of art.
Mondino and Bonomi do not stop at the denture and flesh out conceptualism by using every useful tool, without prejudice, and giving figuration a leading role. An original approach. For them, painting is far from obsolete or incapable of embodying the concept. In this, their evolution takes things even further, where the modern-style reconnection with tradition unleashes new potential: for by reassuring the public eye (which is the first censor), they better reach the mind, seducing it and drawing it into the realm of an Italian-style conceptualism, macaronic, playful and not far removed from pop echoes, espoused by Munari and Pascali, by Boetti and Mondino, and of which Bonomi represents a survival, all the more intense as his work takes on intimate tones, made up of personal relationships with reality that resolve into an art that is almost unarmed, weakened, welcoming. Whilst Mondino embraces and echoes the allure of the dandy—a figure also dear to the early Schifano—bringing into his life the rhythms, wiles and stereotypes associated with the success of a ‘man of the world’, Bonomi conceives of an art whose mechanisms serve as a cradle for that ‘inner child’ of Pascolian conception that we all carry within us until the end: a sort of hard core whose voice is inaudible in the adult world, but which can make itself heard thanks to the enigmatic nature of meaning and the play of interpretations developed through a ‘warm’ and delicate conceptualism, vibrant with irony and wit.
We can appreciate these works to the extent that we allow the child within us to judge them, rather than the adult we are. In this instinctively conceived split of the Subject, planes intersect, meanings shift and polarities cross: perception is affected and art can have its unsettling effect, playful and serious at the same time. Even moving. If this happens, evocations and suggestions do not remain merely what they are but acquire the substance of reasoning within a logic other than the rational one.
Art, like myth, language and all knowledge, are ‘symbols’, wrote Ernst Cassirer in one of his famous works, ‘not insofar as they designate, in the form of an image or an allegory that alludes to and explains, a reality at hand, but insofar as each brings forth from itself its own world of meaning’. And this is what Mondino and Bonomi do, nurturing a “world of meaning of their own” with works that aim for a subjective, personal and intimate conceptualism (another difference from their “grandfather” Marcel), capable of carving out a path of communication within abandoned corners of the mind, where another logic prevails: that of the child or the primitive. Where the toy soldiers, fairies and toy trains used by Bonomi, or the chocolates and sugar used by Mondino, shine magnificently as only the true flesh of art can. This transfiguration of real matter into symbolic matter is due to the artist’s real, and not feigned, weakness. His inability to structure ideologies becomes his strength. The conceptual and emotional tricks he devises take the viewer back to the zero degree of knowledge. Nietzsche writes in *The Gay Science*: ‘Since I grew tired of seeking, I have learnt to find’. Mondino and Bonomi have managed to do just this: consciously devise a strategy to find witticisms, quips, mot d’esprit and jeu des mots which, for the romantic aesthetic, represent the best of thought, the strength of the spirit that discerns fragments of truth.
Aldo Mondino / Corrado Bonomi. Il doppio senso dell'ironia
Tappeti stesi, anni '90
olio su eraclite
175 × 100 cm
Opere correlate
Nessuna opera correlata trovata