ART-PRESENTATION: Ugo Rondinone-Drifting Clouds

Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text, Ugo Rondinone particularly enjoys destabilizing the viewers’ perceptions and unsettling their certainties by developing surprising sensorial environments. Rearranging content and formal elements through a personal poetic filter while drawing directly on the outside world, he envelops the audience in a synesthetic experience.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Ugo Rondinone has developed very precise and repetitive series through which he explores themes of fantasy and desire, branching out in literature and poetry, contemporary cinema, and the visual arts. Ugo Rondinone in his exhibition “Drifting clouds” that spans both Chelsea locations of Gladstone Gallery, presents three distinct yet interrelated bodies of work. Developed throughout his practice, these large-scale landscape drawings, window, and sun sculptures speak directly to Rondinone’s continued exploration of German Romanticism and its key artistic figure, Caspar David Friedrich. Reanimating commonplace objects—such as tree branches or window frames—in his own Neo-Romantic signature, he creates a lyrical world of his own. This formal and generic diversity mines the fecund aesthetic and philosophical tensions central to his work: nature and humanity, exterior world and inner life, expansion and intimacy, organic and artificial. Rondinone stylizes these dichotomies into new physical and temporal sites of self-reflection and universal connection. Rondinone’s sepia drawings of wooded landscapes have been foundational to his oeuvre since 1989. Reminiscent of the drawings of Romantic landscape painters Rodolphe Bresdin and Samuel Palmer, the haptic idiosyncrasies of Rondinone’s hatching gestures manifest in absorbing tableau of knotted trees, twisting branches, and overabundant foliage. In this way, they extend the tradition of the wanderzeichner or wandering draughtsman (a sylvan progenitor to the urban flaneur) into the present day. Exchanging plein air realism for imaginative fiction, these large-scale drawings come from an archive of the artist’s own naturalist sketches of individual flora; they are then patchworked together into a world of Rondinone’s creation. Seducing the viewer into darkness, these drawings recall nature’s central role in the Romantic conception of the sublime. In his Theories of Garden Art (1775/77), noted German philosopher and landscape designer C.C.L. Hirschfeld presaged the soul expanding properties of such expansive and dramatic vistas: Rondinone’s beguiling landscapes, too, inspire one to feel that one “no longer belongs to the everyday, but instead is a being of power and determination manifesting far b-eyond the point at which we stand”. Gladstone’s 21st street location features a monumental sun sculpture, a single ring of gilded bronze, cast from encircling tree branches. Blunt ends of the individual tree trunks and the punctae of twigs bind the sun to the ground, even as it seems to hang in the air. Evoking the celestial body using antecedents of the earth, Rondinone’s sun celebrates the lyrical paradoxes that contour ontological boundaries and how they eventually collapse via the aesthetic gesture’s potential to transform. Both spaces include examples of his series of window sculptures—metal casts of nineteenth-century window casings each named for one of Friedrich’s paintings, including drifting clouds, where this exhibition takes its name.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 22/9-27/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 and Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, New York, Duration 22/9-3/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gladstonegallery.com