This sensitive orchestration of recording time is also at play in Rondinone's companion exhibition in Busan. Here too the artist has made a subtle intervention into the space, covering the large wall of windows that fronts the gallery with a gray UV filter. This slight tuning of the room’s light spectrum has the effect of cooling the space, as if shaded by cloud cover. This allusion to weather is apt, as the gallery is devoted to a suite of seventeen paintings depicting sunset at the artist's home in Mattituck on Long Island, New York. Titled after this domestic location, the "Mattituck" paintings are modest in scale and painted using watercolor on canvas; using a wide palette but one that is limited to three colors in each work, Rondinone captures the delicate moment of sundown, when the sun slips below the horizon. By narrowing the chromatic range of these works to complementary hues, the artist is able to make discernable images that are nevertheless optically charged, conveying some of the magic of this special hour. In this they share a lineage with other painting series such as Rondinone's "cloud" and "sun" paintings both of which also share the titling convention the artist uses for his "Mattituck" wherein the title records the day and year of its completion.
Ugo Rondinone has for nearly forty years made visually stunning work that invites the viewer to renew their senses, becoming more sensitive to the resonances of nature that surround them. In so doing his work serves as a testimony and a balm to those who may be grieving the impermanence of things. Walking across the threshold of the filtered entrance in Busan, the viewer is confronted with a long line of sunsets, as if watching time repeat itself, an almost unbearable testament and a profound meditation on what the artist calls "the living universe," where his work records the elemental features of nature, “this season, this day, this hour, this sound in the grass, this crashing wave, this sunset, this end of the day, this silence."¹
¹ All quotes come from the interview Organic Accord: Ugo Rondinone in Mousse Magazine, November 2020. http://moussemagazine.it/ugo-rondinone-mitchell-anderson-2020/
Source: Kukje Gallery
This sensitive orchestration of recording time is also at play in Rondinone's companion exhibition in Busan. Here too the artist has made a subtle intervention into the space, covering the large wall of windows that fronts the gallery with a gray UV filter. This slight tuning of the room’s light spectrum has the effect of cooling the space, as if shaded by cloud cover. This allusion to weather is apt, as the gallery is devoted to a suite of seventeen paintings depicting sunset at the artist's home in Mattituck on Long Island, New York. Titled after this domestic location, the "Mattituck" paintings are modest in scale and painted using watercolor on canvas; using a wide palette but one that is limited to three colors in each work, Rondinone captures the delicate moment of sundown, when the sun slips below the horizon. By narrowing the chromatic range of these works to complementary hues, the artist is able to make discernable images that are nevertheless optically charged, conveying some of the magic of this special hour. In this they share a lineage with other painting series such as Rondinone's "cloud" and "sun" paintings both of which also share the titling convention the artist uses for his "Mattituck" wherein the title records the day and year of its completion.
Ugo Rondinone has for nearly forty years made visually stunning work that invites the viewer to renew their senses, becoming more sensitive to the resonances of nature that surround them. In so doing his work serves as a testimony and a balm to those who may be grieving the impermanence of things. Walking across the threshold of the filtered entrance in Busan, the viewer is confronted with a long line of sunsets, as if watching time repeat itself, an almost unbearable testament and a profound meditation on what the artist calls "the living universe," where his work records the elemental features of nature, “this season, this day, this hour, this sound in the grass, this crashing wave, this sunset, this end of the day, this silence."¹
¹ All quotes come from the interview Organic Accord: Ugo Rondinone in Mousse Magazine, November 2020. http://moussemagazine.it/ugo-rondinone-mitchell-anderson-2020/
Source: Kukje Gallery
