Ugo Rondinone: At Dusk

features outlandish costumes, distinctive makeup, colorful wigs, exaggerated footwear, and colorful clothing, with the style generally being designed to entertain large audiences. Sounds familiar? Is there a direct line to the artist as an entertainer? What if the clown just sits and contemplates? What if the artist just sits and contemplates? What if the artist has nothing to tell and nothing to defend? With the passive figure I wanted to escape the pressure of the artist as an entertainer, to give myself as much freedom as possible and set my own rules. This notion of liberty and of setting rules was the starting point, and then I turned the clown, the entertainer, into someone who doesn’t entertain and just sits in contemplation.

But he also represents nightmare. The clown figure is first a strong childhood memory. I grew up in Brunnen, a small village surrounded by mountain in Switzerland, where we waited for the arrival of the circus all year round. Distractions were rare. In the early 90’s during the AIDS crisis I started to use the clown as an allegory for myself; a gay artist, an outcast, who people were afraid of.

But they had a lot of success these clowns, we had to ask you more things suddenly. The first time I used the clown was on the cover for a fictive diary in 1991. The fictive diary told the depressed life of a young promiscuous gay artist in Zurich, whose name was Ugo. I did six successive diaries until 1997. Then I moved to New York, I met John (1) and the dark nihilistic fictive destructive gay figure Ugo became obsolete and I ended it.

Burn to Shine. 2021. Nouvelle installation vidéo dévoilée à Paris cet automne New video installation unveiled in Paris this fall. (Court. l’artiste)

Recently you started painting again. In the spring of 2020, I started two new groups of paintings simultaneously; the first group gathers large watercolors of sunsets and sunrises on unprimed canvases.The other group gathers gesso primed shaped canvases, which are stacked over each other, like in my sculptures Mountains. In the sunrise/sunset paintings the watercolors are absorbed softly into the canvas. Unlike the shaped canvases for the Mountains paintings, which are primed and sanded very smoothly, every brush stroke is clearly visible due the hard and polished surface. In both cases the title of the individual painting is a date in German. Both painting groups follow the previous painting groups like the ink landscape, sun paintings, the horizon paintings, the star paintings or the cloud paintings, where the painting serves as a visual portal that one can mentally enter. With the date as title, the paintings organize themselves as a spacetime continuum.

FLYING BODIES

And in Venice? The film you are currently working on is linked to this Venetian exhibition. The project in Venice, which takes place in the 13th century church, the Scuola Grande di Giovanni Evangelista, is called Burn, Shine, Fly. It is a multivocal choral of three groups of sculptures, who were done in different times and come together as comprehensive progression, or not. I don’t worry about comprehensibility. When people tell me they don’t understand a work I say: “Fine, just look to it.The confrontation is part of its power.” Don’t vex yourself with an intellectual understanding of it. The body knows things way before the brain does. Art is primarily about the development of consciousness, not the development of an object. The object is just a catalyst.

A sculpture group in Venice shows seven flying bodies.The bodies are camouflaged as cloudy skies. The flying body-clouds mark the end of a trilogy were the human body merges with natural elements: water, air, soil, fire. In 2009 I made casts of 14 nude dancers in contemplative position—it is the series of Nudes. The sculptures were made with a mix of soils and transparent wax. The soil was sourced from all seven continents. Last year I started a new video installation called Burn to Shine. It shows 12 drummers and 18 dancers dancing in the desert, from sunset to sunrise around a fire. It is the third video installation I am producing in Paris with Corinne Castel. All the people involved are French.

Fouad Boussouf, a Franco-Moroccan choreographer and dancer, has developed for Burn to Shine a piece of cultural blending of traditional Moroccan trance dance and modern dance technic. What links both works, the installation in Venice and the new video installation, is the desire of transformation. His initial inspiration came from a poem of John Giorno titled You Got to Burn to Shine, a Buddhist saying of the coexistence of life and death. This is similar to the much older Greek Mythology of the phoenix, the immortal bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by arising from the of its predecessor. Some legends say it dies in a show of flames and combustion, others that it simply dies and decomposes before being born again.

When I read the title of your exhibition at the Carré d’art in Nîmes in 2016, Becoming Soil, I hear these words from the Ecclesiastes in the Bible: “For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”We can consider your work in a light way at first, but it goes much deeper. The work is imbedded in the observation of nature and its relation to the human condition and connects us with our sources in the natural world. It is beauty, terrors, mysteries and connotations. The paintings and the sculptures in “becoming soil” was a celebration of life; its seasons and rhythms, its plants and stones, with which we share the planet. Like a diarist, I record the living universe: this season, this day, this hour, this sound in the grass, this crashing wave, this sunset, this end of the day, this silence.

In Nîmes, you notably exhibited small bronze animal statuettes that remind me of the Lares gods of Roman families. There were three groups of animals. Birds. Horses. Fishes. Each group was made up of 45 animals. Each single animal represented a natural phenomenal. The artwork was titled Primitive, Primordial, and Primal. I made every sculpture in clay and you can clearly