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Lot Essay
So apt for a Swiss artist: a landscape that could provide a home for Heidi. This scene presents the viewer with a picture-postcard, clichéed and most likely outmoded vision of a fairytale or at least Old Master countryside view. And in so doing, traps the viewer. For this is a picture that subverts such simple pastoral concerns, executed as it was by the Swiss installation artist Ugo Rondinone.
In creating works such as No. 146 Fünfzehnjulineunzehnhundertsechsundneunzig and No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig, Rondinone created a small drawing which he then projected onto a large sheet of paper, and then committed that initial vision to ink on a vast scale. The present work is vast two metres tall, three wide. It is clear that it has not been created en plein air. It is a picture of a picture, and the viewer is not even reassured that the original image represented any true or particular corner of the artist's native Switzerland. The moment the viewer thinks about the picture, its content, its style, the illusion of unity, of honest and direct representation, unravels. The ontological quandary that the picture comprises is made all the more intense because of its size this landscape, executed after a tiny drawing, now absorbs the viewer, transporting us into a fictitious and impossible artistic realm of Rondinone's own invention. Meanwhile, the title, which points to the artist's interest in time and its passing, is ambiguous. It that the date of execution of the source landscape, or of this finished result? Certainly, in the contrast between the quaint tranquillity of the landscape shown, which would seem enchanting on a small scale, and the sheer exertions that must have been made in order to render that same quiet scene on such a vast sheet, the artist brings to the viewer's attention a sense of the amount of time, the amount of his actual life, that it took in order to commit this work to paper.
In creating works such as No. 146 Fünfzehnjulineunzehnhundertsechsundneunzig and No. 100 Vierterjanuarneunzehnhundertachtundneunzig, Rondinone created a small drawing which he then projected onto a large sheet of paper, and then committed that initial vision to ink on a vast scale. The present work is vast two metres tall, three wide. It is clear that it has not been created en plein air. It is a picture of a picture, and the viewer is not even reassured that the original image represented any true or particular corner of the artist's native Switzerland. The moment the viewer thinks about the picture, its content, its style, the illusion of unity, of honest and direct representation, unravels. The ontological quandary that the picture comprises is made all the more intense because of its size this landscape, executed after a tiny drawing, now absorbs the viewer, transporting us into a fictitious and impossible artistic realm of Rondinone's own invention. Meanwhile, the title, which points to the artist's interest in time and its passing, is ambiguous. It that the date of execution of the source landscape, or of this finished result? Certainly, in the contrast between the quaint tranquillity of the landscape shown, which would seem enchanting on a small scale, and the sheer exertions that must have been made in order to render that same quiet scene on such a vast sheet, the artist brings to the viewer's attention a sense of the amount of time, the amount of his actual life, that it took in order to commit this work to paper.