The last part of the photographic inventories that punctuate Babeth Rambault’s work.
The artist is devoted to distance but also offers a reinterpretation of an imposed figure of the exhibition: hanging. There are images from classified ad sites; shots of wall shelves hastily photographed by the salesmen at arm's length, sometimes at their fingertips. In an approach that takes away the spirit of seriousness, we can read praise of the pre-owned, and of the essential presence of a second-hand market in a world that is getting out of control.
A repeated illustration of the touching without fuss, ingenious and clumsy tricks as present as comic effects. But beyond that is highlighted today's society: bodies, things, grappling with gravity, forced mobility, lives made up of expedients as many possible causes.
Then comes an ironic turnaround; the body becomes support, replacing the shelf. In her work, Babeth Rambault shows photography as the thing that holds sculpture, poesy and comic disillusionment together. With her home-made aesthetic, she works with a taste for the simple where elements considered to be of no quality coexist. With no attachment, the artist composes with the impermanence of things, from telluric to domestic.
Émeric Hauchard Mercier
Babeth Rambault (born in 1971, lives and works in Rennes) is a graduate of the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts. Since 2008 she has been running the BIEN Galerie which can be viewed on the Internet, and is dedicated to contemporary art.
Babeth Rambault perceives those moments when customs are derailed and smithereened, in order to form a visual fission. All her works evoke diverging gestural gazes, those gestures which are carried out mechanically while directing the attention elsewhere, and forming a language which it is hard to unravel without losing that obvious sensation of accumulation between thing and gesture, thing and language, concentration and distraction. Her sculptures incorporate found objects and materials evoking an association formed between wasteland and store cupboard, which is expressed, for example, in the setting of two words in the title of the exhibition Landbarras. These arrangements are based on a certain glossary of assemblage, adjusting by way of connections, dovetailing, and resonances of forms, eclectic elements which chance has apparently brought together in one and the same place.
