The common practice linking the work of Robin Rhode and Roman Signer—this week’s highlighted Playtime artists—reveals the playful interaction the artist can have with their own work.
South African artist Robin Rhode has a favorite wall in Johannesburg, where he has painted more than twenty murals since 2011. While Rhode has lived in Berlin for the past fifteen years, his connection to the Newclare neighborhood of Johannesburg is strong. He visits often and stages his performative drawings on the wall there regularly. Inserting himself (or a performer) into his drawings has become his trademark. It is said that his practice is, in fact, derived from a hazing ritual that occurs in South African schools “in which newcomers are made to draw and interact with a figure as if it were real.” Rhode’s approach as it intersects with PlayTime is summarized perfectly when he says, “If you grow up in a volatile society—under apartheid, for example—you start to develop very interesting, humorous takes on the world. You begin to use humor as a coping mechanism. Humor becomes a means of destabilizing a reality that is much harsher. Humor becomes subversion.”
Playful experimenter Roman Signer says “art is a game.” In response to the question, “Do you think a lot about the meaning or background of your works?” he said: “No. I read a lot, about avalanches, dams, volcanic eruptions, fire fighters, architecture, weather. . . . I am neither a craftsman nor an intellectual. Something in between—a game-player.” Working with everyday objects, Signer manages to uses the functional aspects of these objects in a completely unexpected way.
In the spirit of PlayTime, Signer freely admits that he utilizes with multiple elements (wind, water, sand) that play together in concert in his “useless inventions” that are “completely pointless.”
Signer’s reputation as the “explosion artist” is justified, but his engagement with the human need to experiment—a sort of risk and play exercise in itself; a lived experience.
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.)
