Le Sage

Ugo Rondinone (Brunnen, 1963)
Collection : Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain (FCAC), art&tram project

Le Sage (the wise one) is a monumental, ten-meter-high sculpture that stands like a hieratic monolith portraying a gigantic, simplified human figure. Made up of assembled blocks of granite, it is similar to the stone monuments of Stonehenge, the famous site in England. The work by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone is an archaic reference and a tribute to the creativity and virtuosity of Bronze Age engineering. It crosses time, offering an archetypal presence in an urban intersection where a temple and a church face one another. As an element of this triangulation, Le Sage represents a form of universal, ancestral spirituality. With its massive, colossal appearance, its simplified features and the crude carving of its rock, it occupies a distinct place in the urban landscape. Having escaped the most distant past to evoke our human origins, in the present the sculpture invites us to connect with this age-old history. A resident of New York for the past ten years, Ugo Rondinone practices an art tinged with melancholy. Disillusionment with the contemporary world, which he translates into sculpture, video and photography, has given rise to a protean body of work in which references intermingle. A solitary clown, closed doors, gigantic lightbulbs attached to the ceiling, leafless olive trees, grotesque masks, or sculptures with organic and mineral forms: his installations reveal the fragmentary and ungraspable nature of dreams or mental landscapes.
Article commissioned by P3Art
Notice: Séverine Fromaigeat, translation: Matthew Cunningham