Jean-Baptiste Ganne

"Although he is a photographer by training, we cannot sum up the artistic identity of Jean-Baptiste Ganne just by this medium. To be sure, he questions, undoes, and displaces, as he likes to put it, representations, in order to flush out their meaning and bring forth something akin to a kind of double. So Marx's famous Capital finds itself illustrated by Ganne, a matter of dealing with a way of thinking about the contemporaneity of the principles of the book. But he also involves spaces and perceptions. So he plays football, disguised as a delinquent, kicking the projectile with ambiguous strength, close to rage, against the empty walls of one of the galleries in the Musée Chagall, simply filmed for about 20 minutes by a surveillance camera, a matter of imprinting an ambivalent dynamic on hallowed places of art. The marks left by the repeated attacks of the football compose a proposition, somewhere between sacrilegious gesture and naughty boy's activity, unaware of the protocol of a museum. A provocation without looking like one which becomes gradually loaded. This is how Jean-Baptiste Ganne goes about things to leave his mark in the history of art: always with solemnity and a sense of disorder borrowed from seriousness, even if his gestures may at times seem derisory."
Bénédicte Ramade