Ugo Rondinone

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Through April 15

Ugo Rondinone seizes the space at Matthew Marks’ and gives a Technicolor touch to the gallery’s milky glass front. In the first room he exhibits black and white photographs portraying a masked character, almost coming from a cartoon or an S&M magazine, in sharp contrast with the stained glass wall, but in perfect tune with the psychedelic reference to the Seventies.

Conforming to the artist’s interest for various media, this one-man-show offers also paintings, drawings, and a video installation. Those who still expect a clear and unambiguous message to emerge from Rondinone’s work will have to be convinced that multimedia and elusiveness are the artist’s distinguishing characters.

Ever balancing between fiction and reality, between the dullness of the everyday and the unnaturalness of the imaginary, the artist does his best to resist formal classifications and categorization. He is ironical about the language of abstract expressionism with his round target-canvases painted with seductive colors and having a definitely decorative flavor.

The most interesting work in the show is the environmental installation It’s late and the wind carries a faint sound as it moves through the trees. It could be anything. The jingling of little bells perhaps, or the tiny flickering out of tiny lives. I stroll down the sidewalk and close my eyes and open them and wait for my mind to go perfectly blank. Like a room no one has ever entered, a room without any doors or windows. A place where nothing happens. It is a dark soap opera, projected onto six huge screens, performed by three men and three women (each characters appears alone on one of the screens) dealing with everyday activities repeated to the point of boredom.

The black and white images are made vibrant by a bluish light coming from the ceiling, made of lavender-colored glass panels. The films run slowly accompanied by tunes composed and sung by Rondinone himself, and create a surreal and melodramatic atmosphere transcending the concreteness of the characters and their lives.




Micaela Giovannotti
Translation by Bruna Pegoraro Brylawski