2024 / IT’S BEAUTIFUL, YOU WOULD’VE SEEN, AND IT’S ALL AROUND

Duo show with the designer Patrick Kim-Gustafson from April 3 to 7, 2024
ART PARIS ART FAIR, Grand Palais éphémère, Marguo Gallery

Galerie Marguo is pleased to present the works of French artist Laurent Pernot (b.1980, France) and Korean-Swedish designer Patrick Kim-Gustafson (b.1986, Sweden) for Art Paris 2024. Featuring a new series of Pernot’s wood and marble marquetry landscapes and an assembly of Kim-Gustafson’s sculptural furnishings and objets d’art, the works on view are united in their respective approaches to the tenet ‘truth to the nature of materials. This value – that natural materials have their own laws and energies, that they work on our senses – was espoused by William Morris, the figurehead of the British Arts & Crafts Movement, which arose out of the rampant industrialization of the Victorian era, and sharply critiqued its alienation of people from the organic rhythms of their time, labor, and materials that had hitherto shaped their lives. It’s beautiful, you would’ve seen – and it’s all around stakes out a similar position, amidst a new major shift in temporality, labor, and relationship to materiality induced by the rise of technology. Through their unique uses of oak, both Kim-Gustafson and Pernot present works that contest the increasing immateriality of our present, and engage with notions of deep time as it is imbued in wood and stone, conjuring the eternal cyclicality of nature, the seasons and matter.

The series of paintings entitled LES RÊVES NOIRS echoes recent wildfires around the world. Composed of earth resources (marble, burnt wood and gold leaf), the works suggest the passage of time and seasons, and evoke in material and subject the elements of water, earth, sky, snow and fire; they invite us to question both the fragility and regenerative capacity of nature.
The compositions are alternately drawn from the artist’s personal photographs and inspired by iconic landscape painters from the history of art, such as Leon Spilliaert, Nicolas Roerich or the masters of Japanese printmaking. From the flowers commonly known as fire poppies, which germinate only from ashes after forest fires, to the birds that flit among the charred trunks of a winter forest, each painting offers a melancholy yet optimistic vision of the state of our current ecological crisis – a memento mori of the dialectical nature of destruction and rebirth.