2008 / Odile Ouizeman Gallery, Paris

“The sky’s turned black”, solo exhibition from December 12, 2008,  to March 6, 2009

The sky’s turned black is Laurent Pernot’s first solo exhibition at Odile Ouizeman Gallery.

As a set of visions, all the works have in common a certain coincidence with the night, where obscurity is less an object than a source of sensitive experiences.

From Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, from Baudelaire to Saint-Exupéry, or from Jules Verne to Stanley Kubrick, the night has aroused many dark or luminous thoughts. It has always been favorable to dreams or oblivion, to contemplation or spiritual, to exaltation or fear, to the marvelous or melancholy… “Far from reporting the totality of our experiences, the light of reason admits a way of knowledge that worth by clarity and distinction, whereas night, at the opposite, defies mimesis, favors apparitions and valorizes the fringes of perception .”

In Laurent Pernot’s work, the night is a dream force, able to create a world in which space and time merge, and all the works gathered in this exhibition reveal this approach. A dress seems to become alive, a luminous sign appear behind a spiderweb, children faces are dazzled by a mysterious light, fireworks rise, a city is suddenly plunged into darkness, some characters are captured in their wanderings, light flows from the eyes of an imaginary being…

Working from existing images, created or entirely digital, his photographs, drawings, videos and installations are dealing with our relationship to the real and the invisible, and summon the memory and the imagination of the viewer. As the title goes, “the sky’s turned black”, we therefore think about Maurice Blanchot’s writings, for which obscurity means both nihilism and hope.