For 15 years, Phillippe Ramette has been devising and making objects, complements to the human body, that amplify its potential under special, paradoxical conditions while at the same time initiating the thinking process. They are devices or mechanisms that allow him to put himself in strange circumstances, enabling his body to experience what should have otherwise been a mental process.
At the begining Phillippe Ramette defined himself above all as a sculptor with photography playing a secondary role in his work; soon however it began to expand its role as a testimony. Today Ramette stages himself using his objects and photography has become the pretext and the end result for all kinds of tests and experiences.
At his first solo show at Xippas Gallery in Athens, Phillippe Ramette will be presenting a total of 12 photographs. A series of prosthesis sculptures of abstract shape and enigmatic appearance, invisible in the images, has played a key role in their realization. These prosthesis sculptures, camouflaged under his clothes, the typical suit and tie, allow Ramette to assume positions he calls “irrational” (gravity inversions) which last as long as taking a photograph. In this series of “irrational experimentations” Ramette, by inverting the image or his own body, puts himself into a test against the world, defying the laws of gravity.
In Ramette’s photographs, the surrounding space, whether it is a landscape or the interior of a room, is as important as the prosthesis sculptures, allowing the integration of time and its various manifestations in them: human time, time that stops temporarily, waiting.
A video, demonstrating the preparatory stages for taking the picture “Irrational Walk”, will be shown during the exhibition accompanying the photographs.
Phillippe Ramette is always photographed by Marc Domage.
A catalogue will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Phillippe Ramette was born in 1961, and he lives and works in Paris. He has had solo shows in France (Galerie Xippas, Paris, 2004, 2001, Chateau d’ Oiron, Oiron, 2002, Window, Paris, 2001 etc), in Belgium (La Verriere – Hermes, Brussels, 2002), in Germany (Galerie Juliane Wellerdiek, Berlin, Germany, 2001), in the Czech Republic etc. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions while his works are found in important public collections (Maison Européene de la photographie, Fonds National d’ Art Contemporain, Paris, etc).
