When artists take over skateboarding – L’Express

On the forecourt of the Centre Pompidou, it stands in the very place where the large mobile was deployed in other times Horizontal of Calder or Thumb of Caesar. Since the end of June, Cycloid Piazza (1), Raphaël Zarka’s sculpture, attracts all eyes. Created with the architect Jean-Benoît Vétillard, this monumental piece has the particularity of being “skatable”, that is to say practicable by any fan of the four-wheeled board, whether amateur or professional. Beyond the sport, it is a “rubbing together” of the world of skateboarding, the history of art and the science of curved geometries.

The artist, who has been experimenting with the board since childhood, is already the author of four essays on the discipline, including The Forbidden Conjunction (B42 editions, 2023). Here he has taken up the principles of the devices imagined in the experimental physics cabinets of the 17th and 18th centuries, which saw Galileo and his colleagues study the fall of bodies by rolling balls in canals. In 1599, the illustrious astronomer had also named the curve considered the fastest “cycloid”, which Zarka was the first to have introduced into a skateboarding infrastructure.

As the 2024 Paris Olympics prepare to host skateboarding events (2), which mark the discipline’s official entry into the Olympics after an incursion as an additional sport at the Tokyo Games in 2020, museums and galleries are celebrating the practice in France. While Raphaël Zarka is creating the event at Beaubourg, he is also the one-man band of Fortuna (3), an exhibition at the Mrac Occitanie, in Sérignan, which questions the links that skaters and artists – from all eras – have formed with spaces, shapes and textures.

At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM), Ari Marcopoulos, an emblematic photographer and filmmaker of the New York underground, brings together the Parisian institution’s collection with his own photographs, witnesses to the height of skateboarding and the emerging hip-hop scene across the Atlantic in the 1980s. The location of the exhibition (4) is not insignificant since the esplanade of the site that the MAM shares with the Palais de Tokyo has become, since the 1990s, a major skateboarding spot under the name of Dôme. Here, on the vast expanse of marble decorated with steps, skateboarders chain themselves together at all hours ollie, backside and other kickflip in a noisy parade, between technical feats and attempts repeated a hundred times.

The Dome, in fact, is one of the privileged observation grounds of Sylvie Barco, visual artist photographer, co-author with Philippe Danjean and Stéphane Madœuf of the work Art of Skate published this spring by Alernatives, which works closely with skaters. Fascinated by the traces that humans leave in public spaces, she has long carried her lens all over the world to immortalize tagged walls. In 2018, her discovery of the skatepark in Gandia, Spain, marked a turning point in her body of work. There she began the series Gang of Skate (G*O*S*)which combines photographic images, fragments of texts and graphic motifs to give rise to a fully-fledged plastic work. Followers evolving in a dedicated space, equipped with ramps and half pipeSylvie Barco then focuses on those who have appropriated a place by diverting its characteristics from their classic use, such as these boys who tirelessly tread the Dome. An urban laboratory where “every corner opens onto an exploration, a provocation, a challenge”.

Rather than capturing the performance, the artist seeks metaphor: to seize on the fly this board which, by itself, translates the “inner monologue of a youth in search of expression and freedom” in a universe where “everything is hyper studied – baggy outfit, choreography, control”. Freeing herself from the traditional iconography of the levitating skater, she focuses in particular on the relationship that each person has with falling, sometimes disconcerting her models, accustomed to being depicted in the spectacular aspect of the jump.

In the background, the girls, more secretive, also have their place on the asphalt. Sylvie Barco’s photos see them blending with the Queer, Yel and LGBT minority communities to form an atypical group where the board becomes a vector of emancipation and solidarity. These approaches that the visual artist experiments with G*O*S*we find them, condensed into a single piece, in his installation From the wall to the skate (5), which combines photographs, frescoes and objects around skateboarding, installed this summer at SPOT24, the new Parisian venue around urban cultures and the Olympics.

A board, four wheels, tarmac. It’s a whole philosophy, born against a backdrop of counterculture and street art, which is explored by contemporary artists. “Skateboarding has this particularity that it indelibly marks the way of apprehending forms and spaces”, points out Raphaël Zarka, while Sylvie Barco evokes “a quasi-mystical thought that redefines urban space, transcends falling, and sublimates the balance of bodies”, while conveying “memory, transmission, the place of women, self-affirmation”. So many realities that make the board “a pure allegory of life”. All that remains is to grasp its essence. Like the surfing enthusiast – a practice at the origins of skateboarding – the photographer watches for “the right wave” to trigger her camera.

(1) Forecourt of the Centre Pompidou until September 15

(2) Place de la Concorde on July 27 and 28 (“Street”), August 6 and 7 (“Park”)

(3) Mrac Occitanie, Sérignan, until September 22

(4) Museum of Modern Art in Paris until August 25

(5) SPOT24, Paris XVe, from August 13 to November 4.