Kee-Tea Rha

Kee-Tea Rha | Ceramist 

Kee-Tea Rha started with a concept. It remained vague in his mind for a long time. He knows he's "hanging on by a thread", but still struggles to articulate it. The image he captures on his travels remains the vector. He knows that he has occasionally witnessed a flash of space and time, which can take the form of an impressionistic, balancing superimposition of images and reflections of images, or, on the contrary, a suspicious, heavy vacancy, an uneasy hiatus between figuration and function. He scrutinizes these images, dissecting them, letting himself be invaded by what they tell him about society and its dysfunctions. Once he's identified its mysteries, he turns to his preferred mediums, oil paint and clay. Very often, these three poles (ceramics, painting and photography) are requisitioned in his less and less material, less and less balanced installations. The still recent preoccupation with elegant counterpoints is now replaced by an orchestration of emptiness, by a dramaturgy articulated around the feeling of rupture. Rupture of lives, spaces, time, rhythm, functions... Photography bears witness to a state of affairs, while painted, modeled or molded works make contradictory arguments. What follows is a ponderous, almost mute dialogue, and an asphyxiating silence. Kee-Tea Rha excels in this ability to define the fixity of a scene and take a raw look at the absurd frenzy of our societies and the obsolescence of doing, without ever yielding to the demands of a bewitching aesthetic.