The symbol of the cloud, which Ugo Rondinone used once before in his series of Cloud paintings, has been taken up again, this time in order to make sculptures.
Clouds are part of Ugo Rondinone's Scholar Rocks series. The artist owns a collection of these stones found in China’s Tai Lake region, which were traditionally collected and used as ornaments for reflection in landscaped gardens. These stones, riddled with holes due to natural erosion, have long been admired in China for their shapes. In the same way that Rondinone had already moulded old olive trees, he scanned samples of his stone collection here, which he then expanded. A series of Scholar rocks had been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.
Rondinone’s treasured Romantic heritage comes to the fore here, with the cloud a key element in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Rondinone uses sand, gravel, and concrete to make a mix between the natural and the artificial. The temporality here is extensive—a temporality symbolised by the gravel and the sand—in complete contrast with the ephemeral, furtive nature of clouds. Rondinone’s solid grey clouds, at the opposite end of the spectrum to their usual representation in white and their ordinarily liquid state, overthrows our perceptual bearings. In the end, it is hard to say if these are meteorological clouds or clouds of smoke or dust...
Rondinone leaves a few clues, however, in the titles he has chosen for them, creating a sort of inventory or family of clouds, with the happy cloud, the rain cloud, a cloud, an after cloud, anold cloud, a boy cloud. As is often the case with Rondinone, each work has its autonomous existence in the midst of a collective.