Ugo Rondinone and “La noche de plomo (The Night of Lead)”

During his stroll, the hero runs into a young version of himself (20 years younger) who is about to die. His adult self guides his younger self until, with the arrival of the dawn, the latter expires. Like Henny Jahns work, Rondinones exhibition presented at the MUSAC explores the construction of identity, introspection and how the narrators life is at the mercy of the narrative he spins. In a space of over 2,500 square metres (over half of the total temporary exhibition spaces in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), the Brunnen-born artist who now resides in New York takes us on an introspective journey divided into five chapters that threaten to topple the walls that separate reality and dreams, time and space and the banal and the sublime by using asymmetrical metaphors and symbol plays.

The Night of Lead combines new creations by Rondinone, some designed specifically for displaying at the MUSAC, with past works. All of the selected pieces play with the dimensions of the museum halls, alternating oversized sculpture groupings with small figures or large and small-format canvases depicting the central themes around which the artists poetics revolve. The show opens with the sculptures of six ancient olive trees and a light bulb that invite spectators to shed their usual methods of contemplation and adopt a new approach to the stories and images they will find in this exhibition. These elements crate a simulated, inert landscape that has more to do with memory than with a tangible reality.

Ugo Rondinone
Vista de la exposición “Get up girl a sun is running the world” (con Urs Fischer)
Fotografía: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich
Cortesía Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich
©El artista

The next stop on the itinerary presents fourteen paintings encircling the piece entitled If There Were Anywhere but Desert, which depicts a clown lying on the ground, depressed by the sight of the endless horizon, and was invented by Rondinone as his alter ego. Next, visitors enter a new space where they will find five stone and concrete sculptures entitled the Scholar Rocks, large-scale replicas of stones from the Tai region in China. On the backs of these, the artist has pasted pages from The New York Times. As a whole, the work is a reference to the obsession with the passage of time, the heavy burden of life, the shared nexuses of individual and collective sadness Two installations round out “The Night of Lead” exhibit: Still Life (Johns Fireplace), a replica of the fireplace in the apartment of the poet John Giorno, and Its late, which alludes to the periodic and repetitive nature of human acts.

Ugo Rondinone, known internationally since the 1990s for his wide-ranging interests and combination of Pop Art and Minimalist influences, stamps his work with a subversive, nostalgic and highly personal vocabulary. In 2007, he represented his country at the Venice Biennial. His work has been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Vienna Kunsthalle and the Palais de Tokyo, among other venues, and now, at the MUSAC, he presents a specific project dominated by the presence of psychic, affective and remembered elements.

Ugo Rondinone
If There Were Anywhere But Desert. Tuesday Matthew Marks, 2002
Colección Particular
Cortesía Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte
©El artista