Ugo Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone’s careful and studied exhibition might have been understood as a contemporary lesson in Romantic anthropomorphism: the projection of spirituality onto the pastoral landscape and the animals that populate it, at least ideally. But the Swiss artist’s idyllic view was rendered strange and clinical by the temporal dissonance – the distance of centuries – from which it was seen, as well as by the exhibition space. In the gallery, Rondinone’s evocation of an Arcadia was engulfed by a cold concrete floor, grids of fluorescent lights and walls painted light grey. Herein lay the exhibition’s odd atmosphere: an admixture of antediluvian artmaking and the commercialism of the present art world, with its nostalgic nods to the past. The exhibition’s title – ‘Kiss Now Kill Later’ – only added to the strangeness.

The show unfolded like a triptych. Three discrete series – a flock of 30 bronze birds, six enormous monochromatic ink paintings of forest landscapes minutely wrought with a Chinese calligraphy brush and 13 driftwood-like pieces of wood with texts that scroll downwards – were each given their own room. First up: the sculpted birds, lifting or lowering their delicate beaks. Their installation across the floor was so matter-of-fact that any impulse to identify with them was frustrated. Rather than see herself in the birds – grounded, immobile, one of a multitude – the spectator might have simply seen a flock in an art gallery, conjuring for this spectator Maurizio Cattelan’s stuffed pigeons Turisti (Tourists, 1997/2011) installed inside and outside the Central Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, as well as other contemporary artists who have gone the animal route. Yet a failure to identify with the birds does not diminish their beauty, which can be found in the way they are made: hand-moulded in clay and then cast in bronze, the birds bear a filigree of fingerprints and the pressure of (human) imperfections. The naive birds – named after elements, geographical or other, like the desert and the fire (both 2011) – become innocent conveyors of portent and poetic signifiers of place. The subject of time was taken up, somewhat surreally, by clockwork without arms (2011): a marigold-hued stained glass clock – sans arms – cast into the wall overlooking the birds. Illumined and abbreviated, the clock acts as a window onto time, without its steady rush forward.

Less fleet yet more affecting, the second room carried an art historical and autobiographical load. The dense ink paintings on paper – stretched on canvas and mounted on a frame – depict blissfully pastoral mise en scènes which look as if they were pulled from a 19th-century children’s book, though their inspiration is the Englishman Samuel Palmer’s Early Morning (1825), a tiny, sepia water-colour of a forest. Palmer’s small pictorial aubade is re-imagined, in Rondinone’s adept hands, in engulfing works, which each measure approximately 3×4 metres and simulate a familiar if fictitious Arcadia. These poetic landscapes thus do not recall nature but its perfected and sterilized simulacra. Seen from afar, the complicated, crowded line-work evoked less an image than nature organized into a coherent, idealized pattern. Despite their cool clarity, the drawings are distinctly lovely, and it comes as no surprise that the artist has been working on this series for two decades, showing the first works with Eva Presenhuber, at Galerie Walcheturm, in 1991. Each is titled with the date it was made, adding a diaristic dimension to the consideration of time’s passing.

After the contemplative cogency of the first two rooms, the last one disappointed, perhaps because the appearance of text made too literal what had already been suggested. The series – ‘lines out to silence’ (2011) – comprises old wooden boards scripted with vertical stacks of poetic fragments, chosen from many uncited sources and copied out by the artist by hand. The vertical poem turns each piece of scrap wood into a lyrical scroll, although the lines themselves are somewhat uninspired. The title of the exhibition adorns one while other poems are more elegiac in tone: ‘I / am / tired / of / my / hands / I / want / wings’. Yet when the spectator came to the work that reads ‘turn / back / time / let’s / start / this / day / again’, the explicitness of longing -– for past epochs, imaginary or not, and the future – resounded.