- Venue
- Sadie Coles HQ
- Location
French poet Charles Baudelaire is said to have once quipped that sculpture is what you trip over when you step back to admire a painting. This quote, which at other times has been attributed to Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman, expresses the idea that painting, in contrast to sculpture, does away with the presence of the viewer’s body and that this positions it further up the hierarchy of mediums. A sentiment that is relevant to the dichotomy at the centre of Ugo Rondinone solo exhibition at Sadie Coles’ New Burlington Street venue.
On the gallery’s ground floor are nine paintings, each of which consists of a large, white, circular canvas filled with a set of spray painted concentric circles that alternate between a dazzling yellow and a muted orange, their hazy edges melting into the bands of primed canvas that separate them. The resulting formations seem like aggrandised depictions of lens-flare, the hazy, pale blotches that appear on photographs when they are taken with the camera’s lens directed towards the sun. In the lower floor gallery, 175 preparatory drafts on small, square canvases span all four walls. While sharing the concentric circle motif, these smaller works are executed with less precision and using a watery acrylic, which makes them seem dreary in comparison to the brilliance of the finished works in the room above.
The brightness of the sheer yellow used by Rondinone, in conjunction with the hypnotic, Op-Art style swelling and warping effect caused by the circle’s alignment, means the paintings on the ground floor confront the viewer’s field of vision upon their entrance to the gallery. Yet, at the same time as being drawn into these warm and uncomplicated canvases, the viewer must be attentive of where they are stepping, as throughout the space, precisely painted, to-scale bronze casts of apples and pears have been strategically position in pairs on the floor. There is the lack of even the slightest reference to them in the exhibition’s explanatory text and their earthy colour tones means they can go unnoticed on the grey concrete floor, yet their presence clearly effects the process of viewing the paintings that hover above them. They seem like everyday objects mischievously left behind by an audience member to humorously poke at the aura of reverential seriousness that is associated with the viewing of abstract painting. In addition to this, the sculptural objects facilitate a heightened awareness of the physical movement the paintings demand of the viewer who has to move around to stimulate the paintings optical effect, move back to grasp some form of totality and move closer to inspect the varying permutations of the constituent rings. Thus, these humble objects add a level of ambiguity to what would be an otherwise straightforward exhibition.
