
IO SONO UN DRAGO: LA VERA STORIA DI ALESSANDRO MENDINI
Fulvio Irace, a cura di
Electa
2024
Taking a cue from one of Alessandro Mendini's most emblematic self-portraits, this volume traces the stages of a career that begins with childhood projections and extends to his last lines at the drawing board. Rejecting since the 1960s the logic of late rationalism, Mendini has indicated a path that can only superficially be called eclectic. His statement, in fact, should rather be understood as an admission of the complexity of Modernity, an inextricable tangle of flows and attitudes that cannot recognize themselves in an unambiguous and stable identity over time. The “Proust method” - as he called his creative approach inspired by his beloved writer's poetics of reverie - expressed in an iconic way his outlook on the world, his empathy with everyday things, the mystery of poetry and the leaven of irony that turn the “banal” into a surprise and reveal its hidden and human face. His vast oeuvre ranges from design to architecture, from drawing to graphics, to fashion, in the titanic effort to rewrite the world, on the trail of Balla and Depero's “Manifesto of Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.”