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Lot Essay
‘Rondinone’s Target paintings seem at first to be straight appropriations of American Pop, colorfield, and hard-edge abstraction. In fact, these works are less copies giddy impersonations their irony and impurity coming through their deceptively simple surface like a five o’clock shadow on a drag queen. Slightly blurred and clearly vibrating as if electric, these Kenneth- Nolands-on-parade jiggle and cavort.’
—L. HOPTMAN
Ugo Rondinone’s Fünfterseptemberzweitausendundacht (Septemberfifthtwothousandandeight) (2008) is a prime example of the artist’s series of Target paintings, large circular works spray-painted with blurry rings of colour that, despite their apparent simplicity, pulsate with complex, shifting senses of meaning – at once impressively immersive and playfully ironic. Deploying an iconic target symbol, the series makes reference to a host of art historical and pop precedents, recalling the work of Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, as well as the imagery of 1960s psychedelic and mod subcultures. However in Rondinone’s life-size version, rising up over the viewer, the form is defamiliarised, its iconographic, popular origins subverted; rendered in an intense, resonant blue that seems to take on a bottomless depth, the artist instead seems to be pursuing a Klein-like feeling of spiritual unity and infinity. Yet when the eye travels outward to take in the whole painting, this field reacts against the white and lighter blue rings that encircle it, generating a beguiling, almost psychedelic effect that destabilises the viewer’s eye, sending it around the painting without letting it rest. The stencil spray-paints the artist uses give the edges of his rings a soft, elusive fuzziness, questioning the sense of spiritual depth we might read into the painting and at the same time unsettling the iconic quality of the target, their blurriness subtly undermining the target’s symbolic associations of aim. In their place, Rondinone ingeniously produces a target that eludes focus, the work defined by not by stillness and direction, but by a roving, restless dynamism.
—L. HOPTMAN
Ugo Rondinone’s Fünfterseptemberzweitausendundacht (Septemberfifthtwothousandandeight) (2008) is a prime example of the artist’s series of Target paintings, large circular works spray-painted with blurry rings of colour that, despite their apparent simplicity, pulsate with complex, shifting senses of meaning – at once impressively immersive and playfully ironic. Deploying an iconic target symbol, the series makes reference to a host of art historical and pop precedents, recalling the work of Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, as well as the imagery of 1960s psychedelic and mod subcultures. However in Rondinone’s life-size version, rising up over the viewer, the form is defamiliarised, its iconographic, popular origins subverted; rendered in an intense, resonant blue that seems to take on a bottomless depth, the artist instead seems to be pursuing a Klein-like feeling of spiritual unity and infinity. Yet when the eye travels outward to take in the whole painting, this field reacts against the white and lighter blue rings that encircle it, generating a beguiling, almost psychedelic effect that destabilises the viewer’s eye, sending it around the painting without letting it rest. The stencil spray-paints the artist uses give the edges of his rings a soft, elusive fuzziness, questioning the sense of spiritual depth we might read into the painting and at the same time unsettling the iconic quality of the target, their blurriness subtly undermining the target’s symbolic associations of aim. In their place, Rondinone ingeniously produces a target that eludes focus, the work defined by not by stillness and direction, but by a roving, restless dynamism.