LYON.- On July 4th, 2025, French artist Philippe Ramette unveiled his latest public artwork, Éloge de la contemplation, at the Terrasses de la Presqu’île in Lyon. This striking new installation is part of The River Movie, an ambitious public art initiative aimed at reimagining the Banks of the Saône. The project is led by curator and artistic director Jérôme Sans.
Suspended delicately above the Saône River by discreet steel cables, the sculpture features a seated figure, calmly gazing out over the water. The figure appears to float in mid-air, defying gravity and drawing the viewer into a space of stillness and introspection. As with much of Ramette’s work, Éloge de la contemplation challenges conventional perceptions of space, weight, and perspective. It speaks not only to the physical transformation of the riverfront but also to the emotional and symbolic potential of public space.
By blending poetry, engineering and architectural precision, Ramette invites us to reconsider our relationship with the built environment and to rediscover the act of looking. The work resonates with his ongoing explorations of equilibrium and spatial illusion, while offering a powerful and contemplative gesture.
Born in 1961 in Auxerre, France, Philippe Ramette lives and works in Paris.
Most known for his staged photographs of physically improbable situations, Philippe Ramette simultaneously clarifies and complicates ways of how we see and view the world. To experience an exhibition by Philippe Ramette is to enter a field of questions regarding what is tangible, or what can constitute the physically plausible.
In Philippe Ramette’s work, drawings play the role of schematic drafts for fleeting conceptual whims. They often represent a sort of crystallization of absurdist propositions, dreamlike notions where the laws of physics and logic no longer hold sway. Consequently, his indexical-scale sculptures present a similar will to illustrate the possibilities for entropy within the realm of the rational. The artist feeds off of banal experience to expose its potentially uncanny cracks, or to propose extraordinary associations that serve to show the precariousness nature of the codes that govern our daily lives. If one were to summarize the meta-narrative driving the work of Philippe Ramette, one might say that he rationalizes the irrational by defying the world of physical laws, thus rendering his improbable propositions plausible.
Philippe Ramette’s work is visible in various public spaces: his sculpture Eloge du pas de côté, installed on the Place du Bouffay in Nantes in 2018 for the Voyage à Nantes festival, has become permanent. A large-scale installation, Eloge du déplacement, was inaugurated in Nice in the summer of 2018 and can now be seen along the new tram line.
Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to his work in France and abroad, most notably at the Le Voyage à Nantes, France (2018), Polygone Riviera, Cagnes-sur-Mer (2017), Centre régional d’art contemporain, Sète, (2016), Espace Malraux, Chambery (2016), Vitrines sur l’art, la Coupole des Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2014), Institut Français, Lasi, Roumania (2014), Fondation Pablo Atchugarry, Punta del Este, Uruguay (2013), and a traveling exhibition in Indian with Alliance Française (2012-2013). In 2017, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Parvis, Scène nationale Tarbes Pyrénées, as well as at Entrepôt 9, galerie Barnoud, Dijon.
Public and private collections (selection): Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (Paris), MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur- Seine), MAMCO (Geneva), Maison Européenne de la Photograhie (Paris), SMAK, Museum Van Hedendaage Kunst (Gand), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Fondation Neuflize (Paris), Société Générale (La Défense, France).
