La Raccolta, n. 5, 1969

mixed media on canvas
150 × 130 cm
Autenticated artwork

(published in Catalogue Raisonné vol. 1 p. 432)

I 12 King is one of the most important cycles by Mondino; the paintings form an inseparable whole and have a particular role as a parenthetical portion of his career, lasting more than a year. This research marks his shift away from Arte Povera, from the market, the galleries and fashions, towards oriental mysticism, with a particular interest in the treatise of Chinese philosophy I Ching. The Book of Changes, which suggests the title for each portrait and the assonance with I King. In 1969 he was in Rome, where some guests left a disquieting doll without legs sitting on the sofa in his home. He decided to disguise it, and it gradually grew to resemble him, but this object that had appeared by chance obsessed him, so he decided to draw it, exploring the meaning of Time and its cycles, but above all asking himself “who I was, where I was going, what I was doing.” It is an intimate and conceptual work, where the studio is depicted as if it were the face of a clock, with him at the center and the doll in a position corresponding to each hour of the day, always with the same light for every self-portrait, at times also for a month. The first is La Modestia, a very apt title for this absorbing “adventure” he decided to take forward until – tossing the dice – he reached Il Creativo, the canvas on which only the working tools of the painter are shown. The introspective matrix suggested by the paintings of Bacon reveals a tormented Mondino, far from his typical spirit of humor.