Translation by Ron Packham
Letter to Robert Carroll from the painter Aldo Mondino
11 October 2001
Dear Robert,
my dear friend from America, it would have been much better if I had written these few promised lines some time ago. Since a month ago today, life has undergone a certain change for all of us, and anxiety, anguish and fear have been daily on the increase. We are experiencing sensations and feelings that we had never known before, and I seem to have mislaid the optimism and the enthusiasm which have always been such an important part of my character. I haven't stopped working, of course, but you can see that I'm a bit less debonair, even in my writing, than I was when we first met. You're a real American, a cowboy, as your beloved Simona affectionately says, and you face up to the tragedies of these days with spirit and courage, a strength that is not so widespread among us Italians. Maybe we have got other qualities, those that led you to choose to live in this country, to make the journey that I would have liked to make, in the opposite direction. I remember my afternoons spent at the Usis in Turin during the Fifties, devouring the black and white images of Kline and Pollock, and dreaming that I was already a student in the Arts Students League. And instead, in becoming a painter, life led me to make choices that were more European, and easier: Paris, and not New York, as a school, a bit closer to home, a less courageous choice, an easier foreign language, a more familiar culture. But all of this did not have the slightest effect on my American dream, which accompanied me all through the Sixties. I have never asked you, Robert, the reason for your choice of Italy; I don't think it was just for your lovely wife, or the cooking that I know you appreciate. I remember an American artist that I admired (I use the past because he died very young), Paul Thek. One day, I asked him what he was doing in Italy at a time when America had become the real art centre of the world, with its enthusiasm, its rocketing economy, its growing number of art galleries, museums, art magazines (in colour), and great collectors. A dream. He answered that he wanted learn to play the tambourine in Sicily. What a great guy! But you, too, have left your prairies, the parks that you know and love so dearly, the great open spaces, and the exaggerations that you can only find in your home country, not for a luxury top-floor apartment, but for a tiny studio in Versilia. The light is wonderful, and the silence and peace of Ronchi, which have already been appreciated by other artists
before you, have given you the chance, in my opinion, to remember the great woodlands, to bring them into focus (this is not the best word) and concentrate them in highly intense pictures of small, or tiny, dimensions, as if seen under the microscope of memory. In the meantime, the studio gets smaller and smaller, the number of computers increases, and at the same rhythm, your weight progressively increases. The studio becomes a cave which fits you perfectly (this time the word is right), but the woods and the countryside’s have recently started to become populated. There are small, disturbing figures, painted swiftly with great expertise, the cave gets smaller and smaller, there are so many inhabitants inside it now. In this case, my memory goes back much further. I think not only of your childhood, partly spent with your Scottish grandparents, but of an ancestral memory, the stories and the fables of your Irish forefathers. I came back a few weeks later, and the studio-cave had grown bigger again. Some bird of prey had taken possession of your woods and your fables.
Your friend
ALDO MONDINO
Aldo died on March 10,2005
