Drawing Outside the Paper: Robin Rhode

Chalk Bike, 2015. Chalk and steel bicycle. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

The evolution of the graphics technique has ingrained in Man’s cultural condition in such a way that, in time, most of the people acquires the notion that to a drawing is always linked a traditional support such as paper, tissue or even skin – human (tattoo, for example) or from another animal (the medieval parchment and vellum when the paper technology was unknown in the west). Let’s remember still the technical drawing – or the techniques of drawing – used by carpenters or masons when they make marks and lines (primordial elements of drawing) over the stone and the wood to then work upon them. Taking this into account, how odd will be, therefore, to draw outside the paper? Would the act of drawing outside the paper subtract propriety to the concept of drawing? Certainly not. Making marks with a scribbling material it’s the elementary essence of drawing and if not as art, then, at least, as a support to reasoning and creative thought. This generic introduction about the otherness of drawing it’s only to frame the epistemic condition of how many contemporary artists reconstruct drawing outside the paper in an actual way.
Robin Rhode, born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1976, was raised in Johannesburg and graduated from the South Africa School of Film, Television and Dramatic Arts (Johannesburg) in 2000. Although growing up in a post-apartheid era, this artist was more influenced by the new individual expression streams than by the course of effervescent sociopolitical questions. In his work, Robin Rhode encompasses various visual media such as photography, performance, sculpture and drawing to create narratives with more or less socioeconomic critical penchant. His concern seems to be, actually and above all, the narrative of the expression of the individual.
The majority of his works show a gestural sequence – for which, a more advised observer might remember Elliot Erwitt’s “Sequentially Yours” – that implies performance and for which is inherent the component time. Performance cannot exist without the component time and lesser yet without the component space, entering the latter into account through the graphic representations that build the foundations for the sequence. In the two-dimensional images that he creates, the two components – space and time – are collapsed by the observer’s imaginary and refer to the sequence of the gesture even when this sequence is not explicit, but only lets itself be deducted (Chalk Bike, see below). The gesture, in turn, it’s all of those with which the observer can be identified with and that is, somehow, familiar. The hand that activates a chalk disc player (Wheel of Steel) or the fisherman with the fishing rod in hand, fighting a pisciform group of triangles (School of Fish) are images that at first glance reveal themselves as photographic, like if they were fragments of a more completed animation but that, in fact, are settled in a more fundamental form without losing their dynamic condition of latent gestural movement: drawing. In Robin Rhode’s imagery drawing assumes the dimension that it’s proper to it: to transmit an idea, a notion, through a minimum amount of elements that allows the interlocutor to identify the object present in the representation. The observer’s knowledge along with his experience builds up the rest of the narrative according with the instructions given by the artist’s work through the complementary languages (performance, sculpture, etc.) that compose the global work, whether it is to transport to the memory, to transport to a lived experience or to any everyday aspect – although in this case the everyday activity for which it’s referred is used as a bridge to other more transcending meanings such as the logic or mathematical relations (Pascal’s Iron) or the “dance of numbers” in those disciplines (Typing Steps). The work (Bent Mies) is a paradigmatic one when it comes to drawing elements: an individual seems to pull the line that constitutes the chair which design is from Mies Van Der Rohe (double reference to the drawing condition), but instead of the undoing of the chair as happens when a line from a wool sweater is pulled, here the object/chair gets to multiply more and more as the line gets to materialize in a tube (raw material of Mies Van Der Rohe chair) in an absolutely delicious game that questions, ultimately, what might be understood by drawing.
Robin Rhode is, therefore, an expert in the use of the drawing concept in its extra-ordinary form, not holding himself at the street art aesthetics and conventions.

Robin rhode lives and works in Berlin and his work is included in several public collections, including Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Miami Art Museum (Florida), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (France), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) e o Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).

Robi Rhode is represented by Lehmann Maupin and you can see a selection of his works here.

Detail of Chalk Bike, 2015. Chalk and steel bicycle. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

Evidence, 2015. Vinyl, charcoal and barbed wire. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].

Light Giver, Light Taker, 2015. Lâmpada preta: poliurethane foam and charcoal; lâmpada branca: poliurethane foam and chalk. [Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong].