Philippe Ramette
Saturday, 14 January 2012
Work from is oeuvre
“Philippe Ramette has always appeared to me as a kind of flying saucer in the contested landscape of contemporary art. Just consider the generation of artists who began to show their work in the nineties: his remove is evident, both in terms of formal resources and in the nature of his universe. I clearly recall my first conversations (in 1986 at Villa Arson, at the time when I was director) with the odd, “cut-out” image of this slim, fragile, discreet, timid young man, often searching for his words, at times as translucent as his clear blue eyes, as elegantly selfeffacing as his vaguely outdated suits – a kind of Keatonian dandy, as evanescent as his smile which was imbued with a sad humor like Jules Laforgue, as photogenic as a solitary figure by Sanders or one of Truffaut’s adolescents, as simultaneously close and distant as one of those absolute bachelors that the nineteenth-century novel, as well as Duchamp and Kafka, made into emblematic figures of modernity. A student still so much the same today that the calendar seems to have no grasp over him: he always appears to have just emerged from a parallel corridor of time…” – Christian Bernard, July 2001.Translated from the French by Brian Holmes
via Pietmondriaan.