#raphael zarka

Raphael Zarka

“Unlike the art critic, the skater isn’t looking for the ‘unsaid’ in an art piece, its hidden meaning... the skater plays the piece. It’s a full-on performance.”

"…A polychrome skateable sculpture pops up in the Piazza of Centre Pompidou in Paris in time for the 2024 Olympic Games. It’s the brainchild of French artist Raphaël Zarka…"

"…Some of the design influences that Raphaël Zarka turned to for his skateable sculpture were the experimental physics laboratories of the Classical era…"

Cette nuit, je me suis surprise à rêver d’un Paris déserté, devenu le terrain de jeux de skaters profitant de ses multiples architectures et sculptures urbaines. 

Aux États-Unis, on compte des milliers de villes fantômes. Victimes de la crise, elles ont vu ces dernières décennies leurs habitants désœuvrés migrer vers les métropoles les plus proches. Des années plus tard, on voit apparaitre ça et là de nouvelles structures s’ajoutant aux existantes et permettant aux squatteurs/skaters d’optimiser leur expérience de glisse. Dans le cas des piscines californiennes vides, nul besoin d’agréments puisque leurs angles courbes permettent déjà pléthore de figures.

L’artiste français Raphaël Zarka s’est intéressé à cette pratique et à l’imagerie qui l’entoure. Dans Topographie anecdotée, il répertorie les principales formes -courbes, plans inclinés, parallélépipèdes- et matériaux -béton, bois, ferronnerie- constitutifs des skateparks. Prenant comme point commun leur lutte contre la pesanteur, l’artiste fait un parallèle entre les constructions des skaters et les recherches de Galilée. 

« Dans une situation expérimentale similaire, Danny Way [skateur professionnel] et Galilée arrivent aux mêmes conclusions ».

Dans Riding Modern Art, un ouvrage parut aux éditions B42, Zarka compile un ensemble de photographies glanées dans des magazines et des blogs dédiés au skate. Elles montrent des skaters réalisant des figures sur des œuvres d’art urbaines. L’occasion de questionner la notion d’art et sa relation au corps. En les pratiquant, les skateurs mettent en application les mouvements qu’ont voulu suggérer les sculpteurs à travers leurs créations. 

In the chapter of Free Ride, where I wrote this, I’m trying to investigate, what it means to me to see photographs of skaters on the works of art. First, there is of course some aspect of vandalism, because skateboards, most of the time, leave marks on sculptures. But having said that, I had the feeling there was something more to it. To try to answer that, I made a little shift : I decided to investigate the meaning of skaters on sculptures as if it was an art practice. Therefore I’m not really saying that skateboarders belong to the tradition of minimalism or that they are influenced by phenomenology, I am saying that if riding on public art was the work of an artist, it would be rooted in that art movement which implies certain ways to consider sculptures. To explain what it means you have to bear in mind that minimalism comes from the geometrical side of abstract art. Normal artists want to create a form, a composition, but instead of having figures, trees or flowers, you have triangles, circles and cubes. The most radical artists from minimalism, those that I refer to as “phenomenological minimalists”, don’t really care about objects. They care about space. They don’t really care about vision, they care about experience. It’s not about putting an object in a space and looking at it, they think, that objects redefine the whole space. So the artwork is the relationship between a simple form and the space around it. For them, a sculpture is not an object, it is a space that you don’t only look at but that you experience through motion, with your whole body and not only your eyes. I think that is very important and suitable to the logic of skateboarding.

I think one of my first loves in modern art was the work of Kurt Schwitters whose Dadaist collages are made out of stuff he found out in the street. Here the question is not about imagination or expression of the inner-self… which is the type of selfish egotistic approach to making art that I tend to dislike. Like skateboarding, the works of art I am interested in involve a relationship between the world and the self; it is about montage and adaptation more than imagination.

« Paving Space » - The works of Raphaël Zarka - is now available online.