Élisabeth Ballet's Sculptural Landscape at Carré d'art, Nîmes

Élisabeth Ballet's exhibition at Carré d'art in Nîmes (February 9 to April 21, 2002) transforms the museum's galleries into a coherent mental landscape, overcoming the space's typical challenges for sculpture. The artist, known for her discreet practice, derives her work from real-world intuitions and stimuli, refined through drawings before materializing in diverse materials like wood, cardboard, and aluminum. Her sculptures function both as autonomous pieces and as fragments of an open, mysterious narrative. The exhibition is structured in two parts: the first explores territory, with works like Olympia (2000-2002) featuring giant pins scattered around a gray-painted parquet, and Contrôle 3 (1996-2002), a large tinted plexiglass cube on a sand bed within a room painted with building facades and trees. The second part is more sober, with pieces like La tristesse des clous (2002) and Wool Et Water (1985-2002) destabilizing their sculptural stability and transforming their surroundings. Critic Damien Sausset notes that the exhibition offers an index of a fictional reality with stratified places and uneven time, inviting viewers to appropriate its aesthetic language as metaphors for daily life.