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