LAST DAYS FOR THE UGO RONDINONE'S EXHIBITION IN ROME

Thursday 1st September 2016 is the last day to admire inside the exedra of the Mercati di Traiano group of 5 casts of ancient olive trees (winter moon, starvation moon, wind moon spring moon, moon flowers) still present in Puglia and Basilicata, in white painted aluminum. Continue until September 11, however, the exhibition days of giorni d’oro+ notti d’argento at MACRO Testaccio, where the dazzling environment, dominated by light and color, is pervaded by the large installation vocabulary of solitude. In the two locations the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has devised a unique itinerary which will be developed around 2 great environmental installations conceived as 2 cycles, giorni d’oro+ notti d’argento, which will transform the spaces into fantastic settings, where the visitor can engage with the works as a visual and conceptual experience. Pavilion 9B of the MACRO Testaccio will house giorni d’oro+ notti d’argento, which gathers together some of the artist’s works in a dazzling setting dominated by lights and colours and animated by the large installation vocabulary of solitude, the work consists of 45 clowns which with their 45 different postures, represent activities of everyday life, at the same time expressing the anguish of human solitude:be. breathe. sleep. dream. wake. rise. sit. hear. look. think. stand. walk. pee. shower. dress. drink. fart. shit. read. laugh. cook. smell. taste. eat. clean. write. daydream. remember. cry. nap. touch. feel. moan. enjoy. float. love. hope. wish. sing. dance. fall. curse. yawn. undress. lie. Dressed in clothes of different colors, the clowns get their names from the verbs of human activity: to think, to be, to remember, to lie, and so on. Faces with eyes hidden behind white masks, like melancholic and joyous metaphores of individuals who live in a world dominated by artifice, mute and silent protagonists of a stage enlivened by sparks of light and color in hundreds of drawings of rainbows created for Rondinone by the young students of Roman schools. This is not a gathering of works, but a single installation, where the obsession with repetition, a feature of the artist’s work, becomes a universe of suggetions, made more intense and poetic, almost psychedelic, by an architectural space where every wall is transformed into a sculptural element, in perfect symbiosis with the work of art. Inside the exedra of the Mercati di Traiano Rondinone presents, for the first time in Italy, giorni d’oro + notti d’argento, a group of 5 casts of thousand-year old olive trees which arestill standing in Puglia and in Basilicata, in aluminium and coated in white enamel. The artist, who wants to pay homage to the original land of his family which emigrated to Switzerland from Matera, has conceived the idea of bringing the monument back to an ancestral era, in a sort of petrified forest similar to those of the prehistoric era. A flower at the same time fossil and contemporary, loaded with a dramatic and expressive dimension, almost epic, suspended between natural and artificial, between history and prehistory. Space and work of art are united by the same original temporal dimension: the olive trees were planted in the same years that the architect Apollodorus from Damascus built the Markets for the Emperor Trajan, around 100-110 a.D. Rondinone’s trees are silhouetted like a fantastical and surreal vision,and awe the spectator through a strong connection between architecture and nature. The installation will be transferred to Place Vendome in Paris in October 2016 for the forthcoming FIAC. An exhibition of dialogue, but also of contrast: the explosion of colours around the imagery of a man in his 24 hour day at MACRO Testaccio against the monochrome/white of the trees at the installation of the Mercati di Traiano, conceived as an allegory of the 12 month full moon phases. The title of the trees are: winter moon, hunger moon, wind moon, spring moon, flower moon.

   Mercati di Traiano, via Quattro Novembre 94, Roma
   MACRO Testaccio, Padiglione 9B, piazza Orazio Giustiniani 4, Roma