Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. While we are all saturated with digital images and virtual experiences, there exists an artist who obstinately brings us back to a confrontation with reality, while transforming it into something deeply dreamlike. Ugo Rondinone, this Swiss artist born in 1964 in Brunnen, has developed over the decades a body of work that perpetually oscillates between the authentic and the artificial, between the monumental and the intimate, between primitive nature and contemporary culture. His work, of exceptional richness, invites us to rethink our relationship with time, space, and nature in a perpetually changing world.
Heir to German romanticism and its quest for the absolute, Rondinone creates works that transcend traditional categories of art. Monumental sculptures, immersive installations, meditative paintings, transformed photographs: each medium becomes in his hands a tool to explore the limits of our perception and understanding of the world. This diversity is not a sign of dispersion but rather of a coherent research that unfolds in all possible dimensions of artistic expression.
Temporality is at the heart of his work, as evidenced by his famous circular paintings dated in German, such as “siebteraprilneunzehnhundertzweiundneunzig” (1992). These hypnotic paintings with multicolored concentric circles are not simple formal exercises; they embody a deep reflection on the cyclical nature of time, echoing Henri Bergson’s thoughts on pure duration. For Bergson, lived time is not a linear succession of moments, but a continuous interpenetration of past and present. Rondinone’s works materialize this concept: each circle merges into the next, creating a perpetual movement that escapes any chronological measure. This approach to time is also manifested in his installations where clocks, deprived of their hands, become symbols of suspended temporality, freed from the constraints of mechanical measurement.
This exploration of time finds a natural extension in his series of “landscapes”, these large black ink landscapes that constitute the foundations of his work. Started in 1989, they translate a romantic vision of nature, but one that is not simply nostalgic. These landscapes are constructed from fragments of memories and observations, assembled to create mental spaces rather than faithful representations. This approach recalls Friedrich Schelling’s conception of art as mediation between nature and spirit. For Schelling, the artist must not simply imitate nature, but reveal the spirit that animates it. Rondinone’s landscapes accomplish precisely this: they are windows opened not onto the external world, but onto the interiority of our experience of nature, onto this mysterious zone where perception and imagination meet and mutually transform each other.
The artist pushes this reflection even further with his monumental installations like “Seven Magic Mountains” (2016-2023), located in the Nevada desert. This spectacular work, composed of seven totems of rocks painted in fluorescent colors, perfectly illustrates the tension between nature and artifice that characterizes his work. The stones, natural elements par excellence, are transformed by the application of bright synthetic colors. This intervention is not a simple decorative gesture; it participates in a deep reflection on our contemporary relationship with nature. The verticality of the totems creates a striking dialogue with the horizontality of the desert, while their bright colors contrast with the ochre and gray tones of the surrounding landscape. This monumental work thus becomes a meditation on man’s place in nature, on our paradoxical desire to distinguish ourselves from it while seeking to inscribe ourselves within it.
These colored totems echo Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on perception and incarnation. For the French philosopher, our experience of the world is always mediated by our body and our culture. Rondinone’s sculptures materialize this mediation: they are both deeply anchored in the geological reality of the desert and radically transformed by human intervention. This duality creates a productive tension that forces us to rethink our relationship with the natural environment. The artificial colors applied to the rocks do not mask their mineral nature; on the contrary, they emphasize it by creating a contrast that makes their materiality even more present to our consciousness.
The temporal dimension of these installations is also interesting. Unlike Land Art works of the 1960s and 1970s, which often sought to integrate harmoniously into the landscape, Rondinone’s sculptures affirm their artificiality. They create a striking contrast with their environment, as if to emphasize the transitory nature of human intervention against the relative permanence of geological formations. This approach reveals an acute awareness of the Anthropocene, this geological epoch where human activity has become a major force in transforming the planet. Rondinone’s totems can thus be read as markers of our time, monuments that testify to our ability to transform nature while remaining dependent on it.
In a more intimate but no less significant register, his series “nuns + monks” (2020) explores the relationship between spirituality and materiality. These monumental sculptures in painted bronze, inspired by medieval statuary, combine the gravity of their subject with a palette of bright colors that seems to defy their solemnity. This tension between sacred and profane, between tradition and contemporaneity, reveals the influence of Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the loss of aura in modern art. But rather than deploring this loss, Rondinone transforms it into a source of new aesthetic possibilities. The monks and nuns, traditional figures of spiritual contemplation, become under his gaze presences that are both ancestral and resolutely contemporary, bridges between different dimensions of human experience.
The artist does not merely explore these conceptual tensions; he embodies them in the very materiality of his works. His use of bronze, a traditional material par excellence, which he covers with artificial colors, illustrates this approach. Similarly, his life-size clowns, figures both familiar and disturbing, question our relationship with authenticity and representation. These works echo Roland Barthes’s reflections on theater and masks: the clown, an archetypal figure of entertainment, becomes in Rondinone’s work a symbol of contemporary melancholy. These characters, frozen in everyday poses, create a sense of strangeness that forces us to question our own social roles and daily masks.
Light also plays a major role in his work, as evidenced by his famous neon rainbows. These luminous installations, which often carry simple but evocative messages, transform found phrases into visual poetry. This use of artificial light to create stylized natural phenomena perfectly illustrates his ability to transform the banal into the extraordinary. These works recall Gaston Bachelard’s reflections on the poetics of space and reverie: they create luminous bridges between the physical world and the imaginary, between the materiality of neon and the immateriality of light, between the literal message and its poetic transfiguration.
One of Rondinone’s strengths is that he creates works that function simultaneously on several levels. Take the example of his olive tree sculptures in white-painted aluminum. These trees, molded from thousand-year-old specimens from the Matera region in Italy, are simultaneously historical documents, meditations on time, and autonomous aesthetic objects. Their immaculate whiteness transforms them into vegetable ghosts, creating a spectral presence that reminds us of the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. These trees, frozen in metallic eternity, carry within them the memory of the centuries they have traversed while embodying a form of timeless presence.
This spectral dimension is particularly relevant in our time of ecological urgency. Rondinone’s works, in their constant dialogue between nature and artifice, force us to confront our own alienation from the natural world. But rather than adopting a moralizing tone, the artist chooses the path of poetry and transformation. His interventions do not seek to mask their artificiality; on the contrary, they affirm it as an essential component of our contemporary experience of nature. This paradoxical honesty creates a space for reflection where we can question our own relationship with the natural world without losing ourselves in the illusion of a lost authenticity.
The performative dimension of his work is also particularly interesting. His installations are not simply objects to contemplate; they create spaces of experience that transform our perception of time and space. Whether it’s his melancholic clowns frozen in everyday poses or his colored totems in the desert, these works invite us to a form of contemplative participation that recalls John Dewey’s theories on art as experience. The spectator is not a simple observer but an active participant in the construction of the work’s meaning, their body and consciousness being engaged in a dynamic relationship with the installations.
Scale plays a determining role in this experience. Rondinone masters both the monumental and the intimate, creating works that physically surpass us while touching us emotionally. This ability to play with scales is not just a technical feat; it participates in a broader strategy aimed at destabilizing our perceptual certainties. By alternating between the gigantic and the miniature, between the spectacular and the subtle, the artist forces us to reconsider our position in the world. This questioning of our habitual scale of perception creates a sense of contemplative vertigo that opens new possibilities for understanding and experience.
Color is another fundamental element of his artistic vocabulary. His use of fluorescent tints on natural materials creates a visual shock that forces us to look differently at familiar objects. This approach recalls Josef Albers’s theories on color interaction, but pushed in a radically contemporary direction. Rondinone’s colors do not seek harmony; they rather aim to create a productive tension between natural and artificial, between the given and the constructed. This use of color as an element of disruption and transformation participates in his broader strategy of destabilizing our perceptual habits.
Through these different strategies, Rondinone develops a body of work that resists any simple categorization. He is neither a traditional Land Art artist, nor a classical sculptor, nor a conventional painter. His work is situated in the interstices between these categories, creating unexpected bridges between different artistic traditions. This intermediate position allows him to explore fundamental questions about our relationship with time, nature, and ourselves, while avoiding the traps of dogmatism or excessive simplification.
Ugo Rondinone’s work represents a major contribution to contemporary art, not only through its scope and diversity but especially through its ability to renew our perception of the world. Through his subtle or spectacular interventions, he invites us to an active meditation on our place in a constantly transforming world. His art reminds us that the boundary between natural and artificial, between authentic and manufactured, is perhaps less clear than we think, and that it is precisely in this space of uncertainty that lies the possibility of a renewed aesthetic experience. As traditional reference points fade away today, his work offers us new anchor points, not in fixed certainties but in an acute awareness of the complexity and richness of our experience of reality.
