Luciana Rondolini’s work draws on images from the fashion and advertising industries as its starting point: perfect, carefully crafted images with meticulous attention to detail that depict equally perfect, polished women. This is the symbolic marketplace of an ideal of beauty, femininity, and way of being in the world— one that has historically functioned both as a beacon and a constraint for women.
By appealing to that same sense of perfection through hyperrealistic drawing, Rondolini reinterprets these images and then intervenes on them with reddish tones and putty, introducing an ironic twist into her work. In this way, these femmes fatales and contemporary goddesses are placed in situations that put pressure on the underlying premises of a society in which women are subjected to aesthetic standards that define their place within it.
According to the artist herself, “her interest focuses on the world of appearances, a terrain in dispute between surface and essence,” resulting in a body of work that generates ambivalent emotions in the viewer. Rondolini provokes and unsettles, questioning the ways in which each of us chooses to perceive reality and reproduce the social conventions imposed by the media.
However, in The Perfect Picture, she takes this operation a step further by bringing together drawings that include clear clown references. Could it be that everything is a farce? Might she be exposing the absurdity of proposing unattainable standards of beauty, treating women as objects?
The clown becomes a signifier in itself — of laughter and joy, but also of its opposite: sadness and decay. In fashion or marketing, with their images of perfection, there is no room for sadness, maturity, or old age. Both the clown and advertising present a mask without fully revealing its meaning; however, in the former, that meaning can be ambivalent and ambiguous, adding not only multiple layers of interpretation but also diverse points of view.
Similarly, The Perfect Picture — the perfect image — is an idea that can be read on different levels within this exhibition. The perfect image as that of the ideal woman according to the social canon promoted by fashion and advertising. Another perfect image is that of the artwork itself: that glorious moment in art when a piece achieves its own fulfillment, reaching a point where nothing can be added or taken away from it. And a third: that of women appropriating the rules of the game and choosing how they want to present themselves and be seen, leaving behind the passive role of models to be displayed to become agents of action.
With this exhibition, Luciana Rondolini condenses one of the underlying premises of her different series into a strong and assertive body of work, seeking to reflect how the feminine is both sacralized and debased. The vandalism of these gestures — using putty or a kind of false makeup over a supposedly perfect image — questions the role and definition assigned to femininity in our society. Without aiming to abolish that feminine model, the artist instead seeks to resignify it through a conscious act of appropriation.
In this way, female autonomy ceases to be a dichotomy between seemingly mutually exclusive models and roles, becoming instead the expression of the possibility of choosing.
Florencia Saba
Buenos Aires, March 2026
By appealing to that same sense of perfection through hyperrealistic drawing, Rondolini reinterprets these images and then intervenes on them with reddish tones and putty, introducing an ironic twist into her work. In this way, these femmes fatales and contemporary goddesses are placed in situations that put pressure on the underlying premises of a society in which women are subjected to aesthetic standards that define their place within it.
According to the artist herself, “her interest focuses on the world of appearances, a terrain in dispute between surface and essence,” resulting in a body of work that generates ambivalent emotions in the viewer. Rondolini provokes and unsettles, questioning the ways in which each of us chooses to perceive reality and reproduce the social conventions imposed by the media.
However, in The Perfect Picture, she takes this operation a step further by bringing together drawings that include clear clown references. Could it be that everything is a farce? Might she be exposing the absurdity of proposing unattainable standards of beauty, treating women as objects?
The clown becomes a signifier in itself — of laughter and joy, but also of its opposite: sadness and decay. In fashion or marketing, with their images of perfection, there is no room for sadness, maturity, or old age. Both the clown and advertising present a mask without fully revealing its meaning; however, in the former, that meaning can be ambivalent and ambiguous, adding not only multiple layers of interpretation but also diverse points of view.
Similarly, The Perfect Picture — the perfect image — is an idea that can be read on different levels within this exhibition. The perfect image as that of the ideal woman according to the social canon promoted by fashion and advertising. Another perfect image is that of the artwork itself: that glorious moment in art when a piece achieves its own fulfillment, reaching a point where nothing can be added or taken away from it. And a third: that of women appropriating the rules of the game and choosing how they want to present themselves and be seen, leaving behind the passive role of models to be displayed to become agents of action.
With this exhibition, Luciana Rondolini condenses one of the underlying premises of her different series into a strong and assertive body of work, seeking to reflect how the feminine is both sacralized and debased. The vandalism of these gestures — using putty or a kind of false makeup over a supposedly perfect image — questions the role and definition assigned to femininity in our society. Without aiming to abolish that feminine model, the artist instead seeks to resignify it through a conscious act of appropriation.
In this way, female autonomy ceases to be a dichotomy between seemingly mutually exclusive models and roles, becoming instead the expression of the possibility of choosing.
Florencia Saba
Buenos Aires, March 2026