BOOK:Robin Rhode-The Geometry of Colour,Skira Editore

Berlin-based South African artist, Robin Rhode is a multidisciplinary artist who uses a variety of visual languages such as photography, performance, drawing and sculpture to create narratives expressed through materials such as soap, charcoal, chalk and paint. The growing influence of hip-hop, film, and popular sports on youth culture as well as storytelling in the form of colorful murals encouraged the development of his hybrid street-based aesthetic. Despite coming of age in South Africa just after apartheid, Rhode’s work is not primarily motivated by a political or social agenda. In a search for perfection, his images deal with the individual’s existence, exile, loss, the particularity of a place in a specific moment. Combining individual expression with broader concerns, his work utilises techniques of geometric illusion, a range of historical and contemporary references, and a blending of high and low art forms. “Robin Rhode: The Geometry of Colour”, by Skira Editore, echoes Fernand Léger’s words: The craving for color is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Color is raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human has associated colour with his joys, actions and his pleasures. On Rhode’s murals, color is the way of reaching an unattainable wholeness and geometry, the illusion of perfectibility.-Dimitris Lempesis