VOLTA: Raphaël Zarka

Raphael Zarka sees himself as an essayist, as well as an artist and collector. Robert Smithson is one of his heroes, less for the formal manifestations of his work than for his writings and his mining of eclectic range of cultural production. The critic Hall Forster observed, in his text on the 'archival impulse,' that the retrieval of pre-existing sources, be they photographic, filmic, or textual, is carried out by artists 'in a gesture of alternative knowledge.' This observation is echoed to a certain extent in a statement by Zarka: ’I never try to present reality as it is. On the contrary, I’m stressing the fact that we can only ever see the world from our own particular cultural viewpoint.'

Raphaël Zarka, Catalogue raisonné des Rhombis, 2009, wooden pallet, 500 posters 100 x 140 cm