2019 / Titans, Espace 36
TITANS – Espace 36, Saint-Omer
Solo exhibition from May 18 to July 6, 2019
As part of the CNAP SUITE Program in partnership with ADAGP
With the support of the Fondation des Artistes
Laurent Pernot traveled to several countries in Europe and the US continent to photograph landscapes exploited to extract resources, open pit mines. Like an inventory, his images reveal sites that are imposing themselves by their spectacular size, their geography and their environmental context. In these immensities we can scarcely distinguish the flows of men and machines. Titans is the name given by Hesiod in the Greek mythology to the original gods, children of Ouranos Heaven and Gaia the Earth, that contributed to the creation of the world. For the artist these landscapes are the testimony of forces of destruction that can lead to the extermination of vast ecosystems. In a process of decontextualization, in time and space, he confers on his photographs a particular dimension between real and imaginary, between tranquility and ambivalence. Mineral architectures shaped by machines appear in their pure presence, as traces of a civilization passed or projected to the future.