The Light Between Hours

In ORA BLU, Ugo Rondinone articulates a quiet immensity—an elegy rendered in blue. The exhibition, inaugurating Alfonso Artiaco’s new location at Palazzo Partanna, Piazza dei Martiri 58, Naples, opened on Friday, April 4th and continues to draw visitors into its contemplative depths. It unfolds not as spectacle, but as invocation. Vesuvius, long a symbol of elemental force, becomes here a conduit: no longer eruptive, but meditative. Rondinone’s murals dissolve horizon into hue, mapping time’s passage in washes of ultramarine and cobalt. The work is stripped of distraction, its austerity a gesture of reverence.

Rooted in Modernist clarity yet breathing the air of our age, each painting is dated—an index of presence rather than statement. This act, simple and declarative, binds the artist to the world’s turning, to the recurrence of light, to the breath between thoughts. In these chromatic fields, the viewer does not merely see; they wait, they dwell.

Between modernity’s machine and antiquity’s mountain, Rondinone builds a stillness: not frozen, but alive with time. It is a silence that speaks, a form that remembers. The gallery becomes a cloister for the contemporary soul—inviting not escape, but encounter. In ORA BLU, painting becomes pilgrimage. The hours do not pass; they deepen.