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.
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.
« … Philippe Ramette has rather discreetly imposed himself on the French artistic scene as a wide-ranging creator endowed with a strange and poetic sensibility. Ramette offers up an array of objects, sometimes grim and caustic, sometimes ironic, ready for experimentation… »
Jean-Max Colard, Artforum, October 2001
Jean-Max Colard, Artforum, October 2001
Pictures and text, courtesy of Galerie Xippas.
