Ugo Rondinone at Matthew Marks - Brief Article

novel YORK

At first glance, this U solo first appearance of Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone might have been mistaken for a loosely organized assemblage show. It included three abstract target paintings, a big video installation, a series of large photographs, a window installation and a wall filled with ink drawings and hand-lettered diary pages. nevertheless thanks to a unifying exhibition design that highlighted color and vein these disparate works came to appear to be unexpectedly coherent.

Rondinone transformed the gallery's street-level glass facade into a colorful detonation grid, covering the individual panes with translucent plastic sheets in pink, gold-colored red, lime green and of great depth blue. Lured into the gallery through the perky hues, the visitor promptly meetinged five somber, starkly monumental black-and-white photographs. Peering into the shadowy profunditys of these images, you discover rather alarming figures, a certain number of standing and some kneeling, all completely encased in darkly gleaming fetishwear.

The same strained pairing of insouciance and anxiety was repeated in the back gallery. You were plucked in by three vibrantly hu target paintings, whose concentric circles are spray-painted with equal reason as to lend a slightly out-of-focus quality to the bands' cutting sides The closer you approach, the more dizzying the consequence becomes. Sharing the room were 60 black-and-white pages from the artist's 1998 journal, featuring written entries and india-ink drawings of tree Operating somewhere between autobiography and fiction, the true copys shift between overwrought descriptions of crumbling cities and affectless accounts of abandoned be fond of affairs: "When I left, he looked like an object that a visitant had left lying on an armchair apathetic and with no expectations or experiences that went beyond this stupid indifferent moment."

of the like kind journal passages furnished both the title and the emotional lock opener for the show's main circumstance a video installation called It's late and the wind carries a faint uninjured as it moves through the tree Around the darkened space appeared six floor-to-ceiling video projections. These looping, slow-motion clips, single outed from Fassbinder and Antonioni films of the 1960 and '70 or discharge by Rondinone himself, mostly exhibit isolated men or women caught in mundane moments: gazing blankly on the outside a window, hesitating at an apartment door, kneeling absentmindedly before a bookcase or lying with organ of visions wide open in bed. Watching these brief shows it was easy to fall into the temper of dazed disbelief and voluptuous self-absorption that accompanies the extremity of a love affair. (The art critic of the Village Voice, standing nearest to me in the gallery, sighed, "It's thus sad. I want to move home right now and break up with Roberta and become a heroin addict.")

When seen individually, Rondinone's pieces have repeatedly struck me as engaging on the other hand unresolved. With this exhibition, and its relentles swing between emotional and esthetic extremitys what had seemed casually eclectic in his work unexpectedly appeared meticulously thought out. A surprising and impressive exhibition.

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