Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present Julio Rondo's third solo exhibition "The Brake" at the gallery.
Always remaining faithful to his very own and unique technique, which is reverse painting behind glass, Julio Rondo's new works range between abstract painting and objectuality.
The painter’s mission here is the result of a meticulous planning of the used technique, means and composition preceding the process of creating the picture, that does not correspond to an expressive, spontaneous act of painting. By using his personal, visual archive, Rondo creates impressive documents of a life with fast-drying acrylic paint, that are able to activate feelings, thoughts and perceptions without mimetically depicting his environment.
The airbrush streaks from earlier works disappear and give way for soft, vibrant and geometric colour fields which are released from the rigidity of their form by the medium of the order. These colour fields create a three-dimensional liveliness within the artwork.
Most likely to a memory never being identical with objective experiences in its colouring, Rondo’s new works are not merely the result of the natural artistic intensification or development, but rather an energy that is existing in the pictorial space.
The choice of colours carries memories of past decades which have been marked by garish pop culture into the present, making them an integral part of our time.
The significant references to personal experiences and collective basic moods which only emerge through the process of artistic abstraction and through which the filter function of memory recedes into the background, allow Rondo's paintings to be experienced as a space that - as a mirror of the present - could become a projection screen for subjective associations that the viewer has.
Abstraction neither serves to express the loss of context of the postmodern individual, nor does it elevate the works into a sphere of autonomy. In fact, we could rather speak of a kind of "Romantic Abstraction" that - between intellect and emotion - enables an additional form of perception, revealing the past and the future in favour of experiencing the present as a spiritual construct.
Despite the deliberately aleatory naming of the works, the lack of reference is not so absolute that access is only possible in a discursive, art-immanent way. Rather, Rondo places his art in a context with everyday life by transforming personal experience into pictorial objects that depict logocentrically unrecognizable moods of the present. Freed from any narrative attachment, what takes place between past and future thus becomes visible and aesthetically experienceable in the controlled and dormant pictorial space.
Without any claim to the truth, Rondo thus makes the present essentially experienceable. Despite and precisely because of the autobiographical colouring of his works, in them and through them it becomes clear that every experience and every work of art is individual and specific, and that life and art do not have to be shaped by collective discourses and subjective feelings of the past, but by every moment.
Leni Senger (2019)
