Ugo:Thirst.

"You don't have to understand art - but you have to feel it" - Ugo Rondinone

Last Friday I made my second post-lockdown real life art gallery visit (following an earlier trip to see Rachel Whiteread's Internal Objects at the Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill) and, like Ugo Rondinone said, I didn't understand the art. Sadly, I can't say I felt it either.

Ugo Rondinone's 'a sky - a sea - distant mountains - horses - spring' was on display over both London locations (one in Mayfair, the other in Soho) of Sadie Coles HQ and though it was, for the most part, asthetically pleasing to look at it certainly didn't, as suggested in the press release, fill me with 'the fullest range of emotions, desires and dreams"'.

I just thought it was quite nice. A room full of blue glass equine sculptures, slightly smaller than life size and half filled with liquid, some sunrise paintings that reminded me of flags of obscure nations, and another room full of blocks of colour piled atop each other which reminded me of the television cartoons of my 1970s youth. Even if I still can't quite place which programme.

 

There were no specific titles for any of the works as, presumably, this is deemed to be all one piece but I struggled to see any great, or even relevant, thematic link between these three strands except, perhaps - and in this case I'm not sure how a large pink rectangle fits in, the glory of nature.

Nature is, undoubtedly, glorious. Hopefully we all know that anyway - not least because we've spent so much time in it this last year. Further investigation into Rondinone (whose work I have encountered - and wrote about - at least twice in the past:- November 2018 saw him feature in the South London Gallery's KNOCK KNOCK:Humour in Contemporary Art exhibition and, before that, in the autumn of 2017 his ghostly metallic tree, silver moon, featured in the Frieze Sculpture Park in Regent's Park) reveals that what's he trying to do is reverse the tradition of placing a body in a landscape - by placing a landscape in a body.

So, perhaps, by viewing the work with my figurative eyes I was missing the deeper concept at play. If only somebody had told me! As I read further in to Rondinone I became, strangely, both more and less convinced of the work's value so at least the references to the ambiguity at play worked for me

Even if the namecheck for Virginia Woolf felt shoehorned in. I enjoyed my visit (and, even more, I enjoyed getting out of the house, going on the tube, having a walk round a still relatively quiet central London, and popping in a newsagents for a packet of crisps and a bar of Fry's Peppermint Cream chocolate (that stuff is bloody lovely), and later I even looked up which flags Rondinone's work most reminded me of.

Kiribati, Laos, and Palau as it happens. It was a genuinely pleasant afternoon out and the art was nice to look at. I just wish I could have understood it. Even more I wish I could have felt it.