María Carolina Baulo
Trained at the National Institute of Art (IUNA) in visual arts, with workshops and courses carried out with artists such as Hernán Marina, Fabián Burgos, Carlos Huffman and Elsa Soibelman, Luciana Rondolini has a career that is steadily making its way. In addition, her studies include programs and scholarships for artists such as the Anti-project Workshop of the Torcuato Di Tella University (2011); the First edition of the Fundación PROA curatorial clinics (2014); PAC Project, Contemporary artistic practices (2016), all of them in Buenos Aires. Her works were exhibited in galleries abroad – especially the USA – such as The Mission Gallery (Chicago) and Fu art gallery (Miami) and locally at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Fundación Proa, Miau Miau gallery, the San Martín Cultural Center, the Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires, among others. In 2012 she was a finalist of the Petrobras ArteBA Award and received the Barrio Joven Prize by the ArteBA Foundation, 2013; Rondolini also participated in the Art Berlin Contemporary, Miami Project, Expo Chicago, Parc, Peru and Swab Fairs, Barcelona.
Everything that disappears with the passage of time is sensitive material for Luciana Rondolini’s creativity. A work of «easy» reading, accessible to the viewer, close to pop culture and that appeals to the participation of all the senses to have a complete experience in front of it. The artist’s gaze focuses on questioning what the market sells us, where «having» is synonymous with «being» and the products we think we consume, sometimes they are not all that they seem. «The decline of everything you want is the most feared stage. And reversing it is out of our reach, simply because it defies all the laws of nature. Any indication of exhaustion, senility and fatigue resulting from the dissolution and decomposition of the form, its smell and color, causes a reaction of disgust followed by anguish and a certain repulsion. So what is new, what is beautiful and what is pleasant is what you sell and what you buy with absolute conviction,” she says.
Maria Carolina Baulo: All the senses are compromised in front of many of your pieces. And if we add the time factor, the work changes second by second: everything decomposes, disintegrates, disappears. Tell us about the choice of the materials and why this quest that ignores material conservation -without neglecting that your work is sold in art galleries-.
Luciana Rondolini: The choice of materials responds to a spirit of dissent, that of not agreeing with the values of materialism imposed by the market. It is an attempt to return the focus of attention to the sensory experience. Confront the dominant daily image with Nature and its natural processes. There is no better teacher than her, she is the one who reminds us of who sets the rules. I have sold banana peels covered with plastic gems that over time got burned, although, if you are an artist selling work within the art market is accepting this same capitalist logic. Luckily art, as well as nature, are and will be independent of the market.
MCB: A text by Marcos Kramer for ARTE AL LIMITE (2015) closes with a reflection on your work with fruits embellished with gems or personal photos related to famous celebrities. I would like to know more on these series.
LR: The fruits symbolize the illusory, the real baseless hope of achieving something that we yearned for but was impossible to preserve. My fruits have not been bitten, covered by plastic gems, they rot without being tested. They are food that does not feed, they only shine for a short period of time. I realized that this situation that had arisen from a personal feeling could be applied to the handling of the illusion that the market makes through its icons and pop stars. In the name of the perfection and ease of life and using language and the false image as a weapon, we were conditioned and limited in the search for eternity and beauty as a source of power and sacredness. In a material state, eternity is not physical and beauty is not a comparable pattern that brings you closer to or away from the commercially exploitable average, but rather something that everyone has to discover.
MCB: It is interesting the counterpoint between the 10-meter sculpture of an ice cream made of steel and plastic, mounted on a building in Cologne, Germany, and the ephemeral ice sculpture selected in the Petrobras Award-2013 to be shown in context of an international art fair like ArteBA. What can you tell us about these works?
LR: «Cosmic Calamity» was a series of ice sculptures shaped like a stick ice cream that measured one meter eighty referring to the average height of a person. It is a metaphor about the passage of time and the disintegration of the body within the context of an art fair where the works are objects for sale. I share with Pop the use of basic advertising strategies to make the work attractive to the viewer. Although its bright colors and attractive image is a very present reference, my interest was not to simulate reality but that the public being at the fair could experience it, smell the aroma of ice cream, feel the cold of the ice and watch it melt.
MCB: Why does your work allude to food so much?
LR: Working with food has to do with nutrition. What we consume daily from the reality that surrounds us. The one that is often decorated like a wedding cake.
MCB: Your last exhibition “FIN” at Del Infinito gallery focuses on the end of utopias linked to the concepts of beauty, youth, well-being acquired through material goods. What is the way you find to continue expressing a constant concern throughout your production without repeating formulas and always looking for a new format, materials and even aesthetics?
LR: This constant restlessness evolves as time passes. I started working with the idea of disintegration understood as what is inevitably spoiled, until I realized that my interest had to do with wasted potentiality, which was largely the fault of the media manipulation exerted. I discovered then that it is necessary to wake up from the dream that we are sold daily to find a meaning that is our own. «End» symbolizes the end of an old search and the beginning of a new meaning that at the same time may become a new end.
Re: Sculpt, New York, July 5, 2018.