A muddy masquerade proliferates in Luciana Rondolini’s work. A mortuary dust that shines and agglutinates – with cysts, with excrescences – forms the thick pearl that exposes us to expiration, emptiness and the futility of bodies.
In the same way that in the first representations of skulls of the sixteenth century (which were painted on the back of the portraits of the powerful) Luciana’s baroque skins anticipate us as a symbol of the «mors absconditus» – the state of decomposition that awaits all mortals – what its portrayed will look like.
The same happens with her installations of objects-still lifes, where she embellishes with plastic jewels fruits that end up rotting in the room. Again, the mechanism of eternalizing and beautifying these corrupted meats ironically indicates a vacuum that besieges us.
Now, that evocation of the futile character of land goods leads her artwork, almost inevitably, to the world of pop idols. Justin Bieber will be a recurring character, as will Lady Gaga and the portrayed, Miley Cirus.
In this piece, where the famous singer relaxes, all the constituent elements of the Baroque pathos appear. Parody, pomp, artificiality (among other reading keys that Severo Sarduy exposes in his essay on the neo-baroque), but also monstrification, following the line of Gaga, her fame as a “mother-monster” and her constant mutations that also approach the strategies of contemporary art.
Mobile and nodular construction, the masking in Rondolini’s oeuvre finally seeks to crystallize the banality encoded by the fame market. That is, to point out the deception.
At this moment where Miley is not as mainstream as a few years ago, her mirroring face shows us two ways (or two punishments): the passing immortality of idols as robotic relics; or the permanence of these as a desperate novelty.
F.T.
December, 2017.