Raphaël Zarka’s Rampe Cycloïdale, a commission by CNAP at FIAC

Coinciding with the 2018 FIAC contemporary art fair, held 17-21 October in Paris, Raphaël Zarka’s Rampe Cycloïdale (2016, FNAC 2016-0384) will be installed on Avenue Winston Churchill between the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais.

After FIAC, from November 2018, the work will be installed in Toulouse, in front of Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie, for a period of three years.

The work is part of a programme launched by Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) that invites artists to develop an artwork for public space. The protocol, which is conserved by CNAP, comprises instructions and technical data that can be used to create the work at each new location. Activation of the work is a means to rethink a public space for a short period.

Rampe Cycloïdale continues Raphaël Zarka’s exploration of skate culture and more specifically his series of “documentary sculptures”: works whose formal vocabulary refers back to geometric abstraction and which borrow forms from art history, science and technology.

In the sixteenth century, Galileo studied bodies in free fall by observing the movement of balls along inclined planes. Raphaël Zarka invites skaters to re-experiment the laws of classical mechanics on the scale of the human body.

“Skaters know from experience the difference in acceleration in a curve and on an inclined plane, yet skateboard manufacturers only build ramps in the form of an arc of a circle. The reason could be ignorance but the most likely hypothesis is that it’s the easiest curve to produce. My research into the question led me to an article in a September 1985 issue of Thrasher, an American skateboarding magazine. In it, a skater who was also a civil engineering major at California Polytechnic State University studies the possibility for a cycloid ramp, adding that it would be the fastest half pipe in the world. The article ends with these words: ‘In theory it works, on paper it works, but we’ll have to wait for someone to make a cycloid ramp to see if it really works.’ Except no-one has. If skaters are happy with an arc of a circle, why waste time, wood and money? It’s a case of, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” says Raphaël Zarka.

This work was produced with the support of NikeSB and in collaboration with Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse.