Gallery B: Ugo Rondinone 

“turn back time. let’s start this day again”

Opening Friday, 3 October from 19.00 pm to 21,30 pm. – From 3 October to 19 December 2008

The universe built by Ugo Rondinone (Brunnen, 1964) is agreeable and rejecting at the same time, essential and elusive. A constant: time flowing.

For his fourth exhibition in the Raucci/Santamaria gallery, the Swiss artist proposes the installation of sculptures, cast in bronze, weighed down with lead and then painted with a hyperrealistic hand.

The result is a sculpture, apparently light and frail, but actually inaccessible because of it’s weight. A gravity that is imposed and increased by the two natural elements (some lemons and a pine trunk) but also by the domestic ones (some foam sheets and a door), found by chance, bound to cohabit in a disorientating and contrived representation.  The exhibition “turn back time. Let’s start this day again” reflects Rondinone’s melancholic poetry and his marked sensitivity, the delicateness of which is in inverse proportion with the weight of the objects produced.

These sculptures are meant to be contemplative and reassuring but, at the same time, analyzing the content, they call into question every relationship between the observer and his spatio-temporal connections. Memory, the union of recollections, the unforgiving flow of time are crystallized inside inert elements, recognizable as single formal entities, and then so different from reality and for this reason nearly projected in a metaphysical dimension.

The obsession of beauty decaying is stigmatized. The physical metamorphosis of an object, may it be natural or artificial, fixes the instant and preserves the nature of what falls into decay. The short circuit of a visionary artist which highlights the unsolved matter between appearance and essence, shape and substance. Rondinone’s work suggests a lyric and intuitive approach which implicitly returns a heavy reality, lightened by a poetic interpretation of contents.