The Brooklyn Rail

In 2022 the photographer Jason Schmidt arrived at Ugo Rondinone’s studio in Harlem for a photo session. A converted Romanesque church, the studio admits light through stained glass that illuminates Rondinone’s smooth white walls and fine wooden trim. In one photograph the artist appears amidst a fleet of small black sailboats. A cloud made of stone hovers in the background; in the foreground looms a massive floor-standing photograph of lightning in shades of gray. Elsewhere a handwritten note reads, “You don’t have to understand an artwork through linguistic convention.” Indeed. Rondinone’s work transmits meaning through close contact. Its physical presence astounds, bewilders, and lights fires in the hearts of those ready to burn.

In bright light shining three sculptures dominate the interior of the gallery. The bolt of lightning from the print has been cast in bronze, painted fluorescent yellow, and placed with two companions, each a unique shape. They are more than twenty feet tall. By contrast, the stone cloud—titled alluring cloud (2023)—is mounted relatively low on the wall. It’s placed at the height of a countertop so you can walk right up to it and peer into its crannies without craning your neck. Though it’s made of sand, gravel, and concrete, the cloud’s curvaceous shape suggests lightness. Similarly, the trio of lightning sculptures transmit a sense of speed, even as it’s apparent no part of their production was hurried. This kind of material transformation is characteristic of Rondinone’s work and is one of the primary ways it stimulates wonder and imagination.

The texture of the lightning sculptures is surprisingly fibrous and knobby, almost woody. Lightning, we know, is organically shaped by natural laws and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that its branching system resembles a growing tree or a healthy river. The slender and elongated forms of Rondinone’s sculptures also recall the legs of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, spindly yet strong. And like certain of those spiders, these sculptures dwarf the viewer. When you walk amongst them, they reach up like the stilt roots of a mangrove bringing your gaze towards the sky.

As I stood between the rocky cloud and the metal lightning, I was reminded of Rondinone’s recent exhibition in Venice. Last year he installed polyurethane figures at the majestic Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista. The sculptures, painted sky blue and speckled by puffy clouds of white hovered overhead, angelic in the ancient building. Each was titled humancloud and they made-up a significant part of the exhibition, burn shine fly. The works communicate not only in theme but in scale. It would be a curatorial triumph to bring them together.

Rondinone gave the lightning sculptures (all 2023) simple, suggestive titles: glorious light, sublime light, and blissful light. They describe transcendent emotional states and in doing so draw energy from the long history of work that attends to this domain. Because there are three and they interact in the room, especially as one moves around them, they called to mind Antonio Canova’s neoclassical sculpture The Three Graces (1814–17). The Greek poet Hesiod knew the graces as “charities” and the youngest he called Aglaïa, often translated as “festive radiance” and more prosaically as “shining.” These mythological sisters tend to be represented as calm and peaceful and there is a similar serenity to Rondinone’s giant lightning bolts, which joyfully subvert the power and force of the phenomenon they represent.

The combination of cloud and lightning implies stormy weather, but the cloud is “alluring,” and the lightning strikes are peaceful. Perhaps the exhibition title bright light shining suggests the breaking of a storm, a parting of the clouds. After all, lightning doesn’t shine; it flashes—so if the bright light comes from another source perhaps it’s an internal one. “You got to burn to shine” wrote the poet John Giorno, who was married to Rondinone until Giorno died in 2019. The exhibition’s title seems a distant echo of these words. Nowhere does Rondinone propose his exhibition is a lament, but it makes one wonder about aspects of loss and absence, of storms passing. It conjures the nearness of intimacy amidst the immense vastness of nature.