There will always be room and a mare willing to make a fool
If Luciana Rondolini did a non- finite piece, like bronze, marble or any type of work that could be preserved, which lasted 500 or thousands of years, would it still be Luciana Rondolini? the answer is that it will never cease to be, but part of the answer also says that at the moment she is not thinking about durable materials.
She has been insisting for the past years with the ephemeral in her work: melting a giant ice cream, or making visible the rotting process of some fruit jewellery pieces, and in this case, in this show, making wedding cake decoration with cherries and Italian meringue that no sooner you take out a few pictures, it will be gone. Rondolini shows us the hardness of what hardly lasts.
In the Cathedral, opposite the tube station, the ashes of General San Martin have been burning for over 132 years in a urn. That would be a way to preserve as eternal as you could, something that obviously should have disappeared even from memory.
If Rondolini killed a collector and a curator and cooked them for 200 years, would that still be ephemeral art? that is, if she made something that is in process of decomposition, last the maximum time possible; it could also be that in the course it ceases to be art such as a mare smearing paint and make her wallow by a cloth to do an engraving, is no longer art. Sure, the most ephemeral about art is in the media itself, but also in the decomposition of sense. What would happen if Rondolini did an artwork that no one hesitated to call «the ultimate» or » the new» and herself worked developing other trends even more attractive and latest and newer, making new sense on something out dated? Would that still be ephemeral art? And what if in 300 years Luciana Rondolini looked in the mirror and said , – «It’s hard to believe but I am 355 years, I’m still alive.» It would certainly be one of the art historians, vernissage record or most dazzling storyteller. But what if, at the same time everything in the world and the world itself had disappeared and only herself remained floating on air with the mirror? She wouldn’t hesitate, she’d end with the ephemeral pieces, and quit doing art forever.
La Fábrica, Buenos Aires, December, 2012.