Julio Rondo
12 Sep - 11 Oct 2008
JULIO RONDO
"Rented Rooms"
Galerie Reinhard Hauff is pleased to announce the opening of its fifth solo show with new works by Spanish-born Berlin artist Julio Rondo (*1952). The artist—who also teaches graphic design at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart—works with acrylics spraypainted behind glass in a technique he has developed over the years. In the group of large compositions from 2008 included in this show, Rondo pays particular attention to the phenomenon of involuntary emergence of memory. It is, however, not the recovery of the past as a figurative or narrative that is significant for the painter, but the „essence“ of stored perceptions of people, events and places that surface in his compositions. A large corpus of sketches executed over the years—a sort of catalogue of vignettes of episodes forming the remembered past—serve in these as well as in Rondo ’s early works as inspiration and constructional element in his pictorial space. Bold, ornamental gestures in black, blue or red trace and trail the artist’s impressions as he searches for a visual translation of resurging memories and the feelings associated with them. Many layers of lacquer and acrylic sprayed behind the glass pane form a pool of milky white and muted colours that immerses the viewer into the depths below the surface. Rondo is a painter „in search of lost time“ and inteprets the concrete act of remembering in his paintings, in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Proust in literature. Notwithstanding the depersonalized abstract form language of the compositions and their cool, translucent glass surfaces, Rondo ’s suggestive titles convey a repertoire of intimate situations and form a connective tissue between the compositions on view: „Rented Rooms“, „Cheap Hotel“, „I asked for water“, „Shh. Shh. Peaceful“, “ In the yard“,“The other nightfall“, „The other window“ ... Without recourse to realistic forms, the artist creates a graphic expression of life in our time and age.
"Rented Rooms"
Galerie Reinhard Hauff is pleased to announce the opening of its fifth solo show with new works by Spanish-born Berlin artist Julio Rondo (*1952). The artist—who also teaches graphic design at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart—works with acrylics spraypainted behind glass in a technique he has developed over the years. In the group of large compositions from 2008 included in this show, Rondo pays particular attention to the phenomenon of involuntary emergence of memory. It is, however, not the recovery of the past as a figurative or narrative that is significant for the painter, but the „essence“ of stored perceptions of people, events and places that surface in his compositions. A large corpus of sketches executed over the years—a sort of catalogue of vignettes of episodes forming the remembered past—serve in these as well as in Rondo ’s early works as inspiration and constructional element in his pictorial space. Bold, ornamental gestures in black, blue or red trace and trail the artist’s impressions as he searches for a visual translation of resurging memories and the feelings associated with them. Many layers of lacquer and acrylic sprayed behind the glass pane form a pool of milky white and muted colours that immerses the viewer into the depths below the surface. Rondo is a painter „in search of lost time“ and inteprets the concrete act of remembering in his paintings, in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Proust in literature. Notwithstanding the depersonalized abstract form language of the compositions and their cool, translucent glass surfaces, Rondo ’s suggestive titles convey a repertoire of intimate situations and form a connective tissue between the compositions on view: „Rented Rooms“, „Cheap Hotel“, „I asked for water“, „Shh. Shh. Peaceful“, “ In the yard“,“The other nightfall“, „The other window“ ... Without recourse to realistic forms, the artist creates a graphic expression of life in our time and age.