ON THE TRACKS OF DESTINY : Rabarama and the I’ Ching

“Just as causality describes the sequence of events,so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of events. (...) Even to the most biased eye it is obvious that this book represents one long admonition to careful scrutiny of one’s own character,
attitude, and motives.” Carl Gustav Jung, foreword to I’ Ching

front: Rabarama's I'CHING series artwork at 798 Art Space in Beijing

The more “philosophical” side of Rabarama’s work, which moves steadily in short, lucid swerves, continues in the confutation of reason as the primary instrument of knowledge and interpretation of reality, both extrinsic and interior, as far as human beings are concerned.
The striving after the conquest of an alternative thought leads in an almost natural way to the I’ Ching, the famous work on the ancient Chinese art of wisdom.

Rabarama, WEI CHI, 2008

Besides assuming synchronicity and not causality as the interpretation of events,  the I’ Ching indissolubly links its validity as a method of revelation and divination with the knowledge of themselves, a theme around which Rabarama’s work always revolves.

Rabarama, HSIEN, 2008

If the other pole of her study is the persuasion of the looming presence of a “destiny”, then oriental wisdom seems to offer the artist’s creatures new possible solutions: with a view to prophesying them, the recent protagonists of her works seem to associate the thought of their interiority with the immersion in an impalpable, but enveloping melancholy, the likely superior condition of a greater capacity to “see” and of the same creativity.

Rabarama, TUI, 2008

From a purely expressive point of view the light can return to gently caress the surfaces, revealing less bold and contrasted chromatic shades in favor of other more muted and uniform ones.

The intimation of a new sensitivity, which had begun to spread earlier progresses into the femininity of “Hsu”, suffused by the subtle outstretching of her forms by a mild and at the same time painful tedium that characterize the figure.

Rabarama, CHUNG FU, 2008

The extensive use of the hexagram motif, part of the divinatory aspect of I’ Ching, customarily establishes a game midway between their purely decorative importance, the meaning of which they are originally the bearers, and their reference to the artist’s creative development.

 Their intermittent linearity appears effectively to summarize Rabarama’s artistic production, undertaken along the line of a thought, which through suspensions and reconversions has always found itself and its own matrix.

Rabarama, KEN, 2008

(artworks available on Rabarama official website)