Robin Rhode

Prior to this show, I wouldn’t have bet on Robin Rhode’s longevity. After early success for his stop-frame films and photos – in which humans interact with animations of objects chalked on to walls and floors – the South African artist took on a tacky BMW ‘Art Car’ project/ad, a massive action painting created by skidding paint-covered wheels. Rhode’s second White Cube show, meanwhile, primarily hews to his established style. Five brief freeze-frame films flash up singly or in pairs, to tense, percussive musical accompaniments. Yet the work itself, brimming with elliptical power and abstracted tension, is completely compelling.

The leitmotif throughout is destruction involving Gerrit Rietveld’s chairs. In one film, one of the modernist designer’s seats serves as the piano stool for a black composer in tails who menaces his wall-drawn piano, setting it on fire and finally ‘hanging’ it with a real noose. In another, a camouflaged soldier and a spiffy general throw chairs against a wall: the former smashes his; the latter’s remains miraculously unharmed.

Upstairs, meanwhile, are surpassingly elegant monochrome photographs of triangular forms – conical cups, racked black pool balls, white erasers smudged with black ink, etc. Attempt to join the dots between the sophisticated polarising and intersecting of black and white here and the amalgamation of modernist purism, violence and race downstairs, and the inferences feel frighteningly huge yet the irresolution perpetual. This, considered in terms of the history of human conflict, may be Rhode’s point.