The volume from Electa accompanies the extensive retrospective of the work of Alessandro Mendini (1931 – 2019, Milan), promoted by Triennale Milano and Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain that will run from 13 April to 13 October 2024.

Taking its cue from one of Alessandro Mendini’s most emblematic self-portraits, Io sono un drago, the publication reviews the stages of a career that began with childhood projections and continued until the last lines traced on the drawing board.

Rejecting the logic of late Rationalism since the 1960s, Mendini blazed a trail that can only superficially be defined as eclectic. His achievement should rather be understood as an admission of the complexity of Modernity, an inextricable tangle of flows and attitudes that cannot be recognised in an unambiguous and stable identity over time.

The “Proust method” – as he called his creative approach inspired by the poetics of rêverie of his beloved writer – expressed in an iconic way his gaze on the world, his empathy with everyday things, the mystery of poetry and the leaven of irony that transformed the “banal” into surprise and revealed its hidden and human face.

His vast oeuvre ranges from design to architecture, drawing, graphics and fashion, in the titanic effort to rewrite the world, in the wake of Balla and Depero’s “Manifesto for the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”.