From a distance the candles look almost like confetti, dotting the gray of the stone floor with bright red, bright green, yellow, myriad shades of blue that sparkles where the wax melts into little pools. But there are no flames to be seen, it looks as if a gust of wind had just swept through the hall and blown it out. The place where the artist Ugo Rondinone, born in 1964, arranged to meet is one of the most beautiful rooms in Venice, the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista. The Swiss artist was the first artist ever to be invited to exhibit there – and is showing his show “Burn Shine Fly”, which also includes the candles, in the immediate vicinity of paintings by Tintoretto. It’s his summer: his work shines at the Manifesta in Pristina, in Venice, and the Frankfurt Schirn has set up a retrospective for him.
SZ: Your exhibition in Frankfurt is an unusual collaboration: you asked children for contributions.
We invited school classes to participate. And so received more than 6000 drawings from children between the ages of six and twelve. There were no specifications, except that it should be a night picture.
Isn’t that more of a project than the Educational Department would otherwise do?
It’s not about accompanying my exhibition. But the opening of the museum. As public buildings, museums are a cumbersome place; I want a change there. That could mean an initial spark for art, a moment in which something becomes possible in principle.
Is it also about “art for everyone”, a term that was coined in Frankfurt.
In any case, access to art must be made easier. It would also be good if you didn’t have to pay an entrance fee. Children should not have to pay anything to visit a museum anyway.
Were you interested in art as a child?
I think my work has its roots in the impressions I had as a child. I was born and raised in Brunnen. Brunnen sits in a valley on Lake Lucerne. A postcard idyll with high mountains and clear lakes. I spent the summer holidays with my grandmother in Matera in southern Italy. There were these two worlds that couldn’t be more different: on one side the blue lake and the green meadows, on the other the grey-brown stone. Matera is the city of stones.
Would you say that you were already an artist back then?
My artistic work begins in 1990 with two contrasting groups of pictures, the starting point of which is nature: the landscape pictures and the sun pictures. One refers to the past, the other to the future. The landscape paintings in ink imitate the vedutas of the 16th century as Goethe made them in his traveling drawings, and “Sun Pictures” uses a ‘pictogram’ of modernity: circles and targets, as we know them from Kandinsky to Fangor.
How did you first become interested in nature?
From 1985 to 1990 I studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The period also marked the peak of the AIDS crisis. My friend at the time, Manfred Welser, died of it in 1989 within three months. I realized that life could end suddenly and as a gay man I expected to be next. So I didn’t want to spend the short rest of my life in the studio, but make the most of the time I have left. So I started wandering around, in nature and in the city. I became a flâneur. This is how my first landscapes came about. I graduated with them. A year later I started with the sun pictures.
You have also done a lot of work for the public space – is it also about accessibility, about reaching the flaneurs too?
Absolutely. But that doesn’t have to be my art. Last year I was fascinated by how the whole of Paris experienced Christo’s wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe. And the atmosphere wasn’t ramba-zamba – on the contrary. It seemed as if downtown was shrouded in respectful silence.
How are the children’s nocturnal motifs linked to your own work?
I would like to draw a line from my beginnings in 1991 to my last work from this year. There is a subliminal story, also called “Life Time”, and a story arc that goes from night to day. From the stars to a group of golden sun images. A journey that, retrospectively, at the same time draws an arc. After all, every exhibition is a story that is biographically motivated, that contains a lifetime.
You mean an autobiography that keeps adding chapters?
Not really. It’s a narrative that gets easier over the years. More and more symbols are added, universal symbols that later condense into something like an alphabet. For me it goes from the tree to the rainbow to the window. These are archetypes of a general language.
Here in Venice, your exhibition begins with the arch of the sun, which was already erected in Versailles.
Here, too, night and day are involved, “Burn Shine Fly” describes a development cycle based on a poem by my late husband John Giorno. It’s titled “You’ve got to burn to shine”. He was a Buddhist, so that line became the trigger for this progression. He continues to accompany my work, he is still there.
Is this a form of grieving?
That plays into it, it’s the work after his death. Of course, the Covid period was also a good time for mourning.
You installed your work “Still Life Candles”, which was actually created in 2013, on graves here.
Yes, they should mark that someone is lying there. This side room is a closed graveyard. At first glance, the connection seems very direct.
However, you also undermine the pathos with the very bright, lively color scheme.
I was also concerned with the fact that the hand-painted, bright candles are very heavy. That they are cast from bronze and – while such casts are otherwise hollow inside – were filled with lead.
As they stand, they appear fragile, as if visitors could knock them over. In reality you’ve anchored them firmly – you’d probably break your toes.
It was important that they stop. An ideal of the sculpture is that you can dance around it.