by
Hell Yes!
by Ugo Rondinone
1999
Drawn and written in Indian ink, Ugo Rondinone's "Diaries" have been playing an important role in his oeuvre since 1992. His "Diaries" are conceived as notations covering an entire year with titles such as 1996, yet both the evocation of actual event duration and the contents are of a fictive and literary nature.
Rondinone blends fiction with metaphors of authenticity, leading readers into the lonely times of a report about individual experience that is manipulated and stylised: boredom, rapture, love, failure and excessiveness. The artist's book "Hell, Yes" regroups elements of his oeuvre. Rondinone translates drawing and writing of his "Diaries" into photography and printed text, combining his photographic work of "In the Sweet Years Remaining" with texts from the 1998 diary into a cinematic whole. For the first time, the textual appendix features all of Rondinone's diary texts in English.