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Lot Essay
In No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig, Rondinone has taken a small sketch of a possibly fictitious Swiss landscape that appears to have popped straight out of the world of fairytales or tourist propaganda and has reprised it on a vast scale. The medium, ink on paper, is one that is usually associated with small-scale works, and yet here we see a landscape drawing that stretches three metres long, absorbing the viewer. In a sense, this drawing has become landscape. Despite being in part based on Rondinone's own imagination of the landscape, this image takes on a great authority that derives from its overwhelming and imposing scale.
It is in its scale that No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig gains its peculiar tension. Rondinone has clearly been forced to exert himself a great deal in order to commit the accumulation of marks necessary to capture this image on such a vast surface. There is an implied frenzy of execution which, contrasting with the tranquillity of the scene, introduces a strange and unique tension between the representation and the source 'reality'. This is heightened by the fact that this image is in 'negative', with the dark lines on a white sheet replaced by a predominantly black image. This is both the result of even more exertion than a 'positive' drawing on the same scale, and also forces the viewer to acknowledge the implied artifice of the situation. In this, Rondinone's status as an installation artist rather than a traditional landscape painter comes to the fore.
The fact that No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig is based on a drawing that itself has many of the hallmarks of the conservative art and landscape has often even had conservative political associations adds to the degree to which Rondinone has disrupted the expectations of his viewer. Here, a drawing that is almost kitsch has been used as a part of a highly conceptual arsenal in order to raise questions of authenticity, experience and aesthetics, while also providing a strangely cool and detached yet deeply involved solution to the dilemma faced by so many artists: what mark to make on the blank surface.
It is in its scale that No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig gains its peculiar tension. Rondinone has clearly been forced to exert himself a great deal in order to commit the accumulation of marks necessary to capture this image on such a vast surface. There is an implied frenzy of execution which, contrasting with the tranquillity of the scene, introduces a strange and unique tension between the representation and the source 'reality'. This is heightened by the fact that this image is in 'negative', with the dark lines on a white sheet replaced by a predominantly black image. This is both the result of even more exertion than a 'positive' drawing on the same scale, and also forces the viewer to acknowledge the implied artifice of the situation. In this, Rondinone's status as an installation artist rather than a traditional landscape painter comes to the fore.
The fact that No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig is based on a drawing that itself has many of the hallmarks of the conservative art and landscape has often even had conservative political associations adds to the degree to which Rondinone has disrupted the expectations of his viewer. Here, a drawing that is almost kitsch has been used as a part of a highly conceptual arsenal in order to raise questions of authenticity, experience and aesthetics, while also providing a strangely cool and detached yet deeply involved solution to the dilemma faced by so many artists: what mark to make on the blank surface.