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He is more of a discoverer than an inventor. Raphaël Zarka calls himself a ‘collector of forms’. His ever-expanding collection includes photos of sculptures in public space that you can skateboard on, but he also has a nice assortment of rhombicuboctahedrons.Paris-based, French artist Raphaël Zarka (b. 1977) is a sculptor whose relationship with the three-dimensional registers not only in objects, but also in photos, images, films and essays. Known to refer to himself as a collector of forms, Zarka is as much a kind of geometrical archaeologist as he is an urban theorist. If ever there were a Borgesian sculpture, his would be it, in the sense that the artist is essentially preoccupied with the timeless migration of finite forms; how the same form might surface throughout different points in history and contexts and assume different significations and purposes. As such, Zarka does not seek to invent, but rather to discover. All of which takes place within a specific, personally constructed constellation of influence and points of reference, which include Minimalism, Land Art from the 70s, Constructivist sculpture, the unorthodox art historical theories of Aby Warburg, the social philosophy of Roger Caillois, and above all, an abiding interest in skateboarding, its history and urban implications. The on-going series Les formes du repos (Resting Forms, begun in 2001) inaugurates and embodies many of the concerns that motivate the artist. Consisting of colour photographs, the series depicts found, often abandoned concrete structures, such as a weed-bestrewn, frost-covered, concrete half-pipe in a wintry forest (#9, 2008), or a pair of disused, concrete breakwaters found on the road near Sète, from 2001. While the former is evocative of an improbable oneiric episode (few things are more nightmarish for the skater than the harnessing of a hypothetically skateable urban terrain being precluded by the advent of nature), the latter speaks to an equally improbable a-historical, if accidental minimalism. There is something at once natural and unnatural about the series, whose dual, contradictory status issues as much from an art historical optical unconscious as it does from urban experience. What skateboarding and minimalism have in common here is a mutual tendency to practically and aesthetically alter the perception of otherwise purely pragmatic objects, and thus disclose how natural, knee-jerk readings of objects are conditioned by experience and history, and, are, as such, never natural. The artist’s subsequent series, Riding Modern Art (2007), seems to unite and resolve some of the tension in Les formes du repos while addressing other vistas in the artist’s practice. This collection of eleven images, initially spotted in skateboarding magazines and collected from the original photographers, portrays skaters skating on public sculpture. The monumental sculpture used ranges from anonymous public sculptures to more recognizable works by Richard Serra (upon whose interior one skater executes a backside wall ride). This documentary interest has also been developed into the documentary-like film Species of Spaces in Skateboarding (2008), which draws from roughly 40 skateboarding videos made between 1964 and 2006, and whose debt to the land art videos, of say Nancy Holt, is avowed and unmistakeable. By showing such public ornamentation in a state of un-intended use, Zarka exploits skateboarding to at once reveal a kind of hybrid urban experience and allegorize the repurposing of forms.[1] The flip side of this sensitivity to repurposing is a kindred sensitivity to the migration of largely geometric forms, probably best embodied in Zarka’s enduring preoccupation with the 26-sided rhombicuboctahedron (a form featured in Les formes du repos, which also stands at the origin of this preoccupation). Zarka has all but obsessively mapped out this form’s recurring emergence throughout history and portrayed that trajectory in a series of different works, from the film Rhombus Sectus (2009), which rather drily but effectively depicts – in the spirit, let’s say, of an un-narrated documentary – the world’s largest rhombicuboctahedron, the National Library of Belarus in Minsk, to his Catalogue Raisonné des Rhombicuboctaedres (2010), a large-format poster which features 52 incarnations/representations of the form. The artist uses a documentary technique similar to that of Rhombus Sectus in his most recent film, Gibellina Vecchia (2010). Shot in eastern Sicily near the town of Trapani, this video portrays a vast work of land art/monument by the Italian artist Alberto Burri, entitled Grande Cretto (1985-89). Burri’s work is constructed on the site of the historical centre of the town of Gibellina, which was virtually destroyed in a huge earthquake in 1968, and abandoned soon thereafter. The Italian artist enveloped the mountainside site of roughly 300 by 400 meters in a grooved and networked carapace of concrete. In Zarka’s filming of the prodigious monument, which shows the space, empty as well as occupied by local teenagers, from a variety of viewpoints, it takes on a conspicuously urban character. Indeed, the extent to which this work of Burri’s is modified by being contextualized within Zarka’s practice is striking. For it becomes a eulogy to an improbable hybridization of nature and the city, at once starkly elegiac, in terms of the past loss it laments and the unpeopled future it evocatively foretokens, and, to coin a neologism apropos of Zarka’s work, skaterly – which is to say, possessing an aesthetic appeal based on the possibility, if only hypothetical, of being skated. As interpretable as it is succinct, the film speaks to the understated dynamism that increasingly drives the artist’s work, and as such becomes a metaphor for Zarka’s practice in general. Chris Sharp is a writer and independent curator based in Paris, and editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope MagazineRaphaël Zarka: GibellinaStroom, The Hague29 May – 21 August1 Zarka’s interest in skateboarding extends to its history as well as theoretical interpretations, which he comprehensively organizes in pellucid and cogent prose in the recently published English translation, On a Day with No Waves: Chronicle of Skateboarding, 1779 -2009.