Autumn is here. The drizzly entrée to winter’s main course is making its presence felt and the city seems greyer and more miserable than ever. But there’s a little bit of sunshine left in Sadie Cole’s massive central London gallery.
Ugo Rondinone’s show is a vitamin D shot of neon sculptures and bubbly sky-blue paintings. The Swiss artist is known for his cartoonish, Technicolor art, and he hasn’t strayed too far from that path with these new works. Let’s start with the paintings that line the walls. Each of these oddly shaped canvases is square at the bottom and carved out into rounded cloud shapes at the top, fading from white up to light blue – they’re fun, silly windows on to a perfect sky. You can spout a lot of guff about how they reference eighteenth-century Romantic landscapes, or how they reorder a natural element for artistic purposes. But who cares. That all undermines their fundamental happy simplicity.
The same can be said for the stacked stone sculptures that litter the floor. Rondinone’s basically found a bunch of rocks, painted them in eye-searing shades of neon and stacked them in inconceivably precarious ways. It’s a classic ‘nick something from the real world, spruce it up a bit and whack it in a gallery’ move. They’re wonderfully rickety-looking things – big rocks balance on little ones at odd angles – but they’re clearly being held together by forces other than gravity and equilibrium. You could probably give one a knock and it would be fiiiine. Probably.
The final works are a handful of long, thin aluminium coils. There’s a good reason they’re tucked away in another room – they’re derivative and not particularly attractive contemporary sculptures. The rocks and clouds are the best things here. I don’t think they’re very clever, I don’t think they’re that great, but as the rain leaves me shivering on the walk back to the office, I’m grateful to have bathed in their simple sunny joy for a few minutes.
Eddy Frankel