Urban skateboarding may not have an obvious relationship with the pure forms of Archimedean geometry but French artist Raphaël Zarka’s active engagement with both of the above subjects comes from his ongoing interest in how form and movement function within public space.
In previous photographs, texts and films (one of which will be screened at Tate Modern on Feb 28), Zarka has documented how skateboarders interact with both public sculpture and what he describes as ‘Les Formes du Repos’ (Forms of Rest) – the random bits of unfinished and abandoned architecture that lay strewn about the landscape. For his gallery show, ‘Rhombus Sectus’, Zarka has focused on one such find – a pair of concrete breakwaters in the shape of the tongue-twistingly titled rhombicuboctahedron, a 26-sided solid with eight triangular and 18 square faces.
In Zarka’s subsequent research into where else this form can be found (presented as a poster for visitors to take away) he uncovers it everywhere from drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and columns on a seventeenth-century Chinese monastery, to lanterns in Trafalgar Square and, in elongated form, as the Rubik’s Cube variation the Rubik’s Snake. Most bizarrely, it’s also the shape for the National Library of Belarus and so the subject of a short film by Zarka. Designed in the 1980s but not completed until 2006, what appears as a drab grey structure during the day is transformed at night by a cladding of multicoloured lights, which phase in a pulsing psychedelic sequence – far more fitting for Las Vegas than suburban Minsk.
Zarka may not state that there’s any deeper meaning to all these everyday rhombicuboctahedra but somehow the suggestion is still there. Maybe the mystery is that structures we have never noticed are still very much part of how the world functions today.