Veering into the middle ground between appropriations of pop culture and shiny kitsch, artist Luciana Rondolini creates a new breed of popular art by fleshing out the space between consumption and desire. The artist skates on these edges, creating drawings of flattened pop stars, molding diamond-studs onto the rinds of rotting fruit, and excerpting various iterations of Miley Cyrus’ gyrating tongue. Her graphite-on-paper drawings and throwaway sculptures produce an overwhelming desire to possess these celebrity renditions and rotting status symbols, all of which will eventually decompose, mature, or just plain disappear. Instead we’re left always wanting more from objects and images specifically designed to never satisfy.
Likewise, her drawings of Pop-icons are a parody of the artificiality laying beneath idols such as Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus, and the impact media figures have among worshiping teenagers.
Rondolini’s work seeks to crystallize the banality encoded by the market of fame and point out the deception and empty appearance through ornamenting the faces and bodies of these icons, as if it was enough to preserve them from the passing of time and unavoidable disenchantment of the ephemeral celebrity culture that characterizes our society.
