A new personal exhibition of the work of the New York artist who lives and works in Naples.
The MADRE Contemporary Art Museum in Naples offers a selection of 13 new, unpublished paintings, most of which are very large, all of them executed in 2009. Defined by Milan Kundera as a “historic rarity”, the work of Mendoza is certainly atypical: because, by consciously choosing painting as a form of expression, the artist is like “someone who has survived from an old war that has long been forgotten”, who is bringing back to contemporary art a traditional type of artistic output that had virtually been abandoned. Through subjects and themes from everyday life and filtered by the obsessions of the unconscious, in this case “the possessed”, Mendoza’s works convey social hardship and the difficulties involved in finding one’s own roots, in a journey that absorbs the stylistic elements of American popular culture and the strict lessons of the Old Masters. In addition to an essay by the curator of the exhibition, Vincenzo Trione, the catalog also contains literary contributions by Milan Kundera and Tiziano Scarpa, as well as an interview with the artist conducted by Neapolitan writer Maurizio Braucci.