Philippe Ramette
18.11.22 → 31.12.22
On the occasion of Philippe Ramette’s solo show in our Parisian gallery, we are delighted to share with you ‘Le regardeur’, a film by Kevin Chauche dedicated to Philippe Ramette’s Deauville series.
To see and capture the world differently – that is the credo of both Philippe Ramette and the director Kevin Chauche whose film follows the artist “behind the scenes” and shows us the making of his famous paradoxical photographs.
Here, we witness Philippe Ramette in Deauville working together with Marc Dommage, his usual companion in his photographic explorations and experiments. First, we catch him on the beach, then, sitting on an impossibly twisted surface of an architectural structure… Magic? Or is it the world that has suddenly gone mad, turning upside down and making our heads turn too?
Scratching the limits of possible, Philippe Ramette reverses the landscape, destabilizes the codes of perception and defies both gravity and ‘natural’ order of being, whilst shaking it to its very core. He makes a ‘step aside’ – an ultimate poetical gesture – and challenges the rigidity of habit and convention, enchanting the real and pushing its boundaries further into the irrational.
Born in 1961 in Auxerre, France, Philippe Ramette lives and works in Paris.
Most known for his staged photographs of physically improbable situations, Philippe Ramette simultaneously clarifies and complicates ways of how we see and view the world. To experience an exhibition by Philippe Ramette is to enter a field of questions regarding what is tangible, or what can constitute the physically plausible. In Philippe Ramette’s work, drawings play the role of schematic drafts for fleeting conceptual whims. They often represent a sort of crystallization of absurdist propositions, dreamlike notions where the laws of physics and logic no longer hold sway.
The artist feeds off of banal experience to expose its potentially uncanny cracks, or to propose extraordinary associations that serve to show the precariousness nature of the codes that govern our daily lives.
