2025 / DOWN TO EARTH

Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Down to earth, a duo exhibition by French artist Laurent Pernot and Korean-Swedish designer Patrick Kim-Gustafson, from January 23rd to March 22nd, 2025.

The show’s title evokes ideas of immanence and the allegorical powers of matter, but also a return to nature which resonates with our current environmental concerns. Following a successful presentation of both artists at Art Paris 2024, this exhibition extends their dialogue further, reflecting on the artists’ shared use of organic elements, notably fire as a simultaneously destructive, transformational, and preserving force. Drawing on their respective relationships to the land -Pernot’s rooted in a farming heritage and Kim-Gustafson’s shaped by a life immersed in woodworking- their works offer a reflection on the cycles of nature, material, and time.

A trained industrial designer, Patrick Kim-Gustafson approaches woodworking as a tactile and intuitive process. Beginning with reclaimed oak beams, some over a century old, he crafts pieces that blur the line between sculpture and furniture, muddling the distinction between form and function with humor. Inspired by his upbringing in the Swedish landscape, Kim-Gustafson presents a series of wooden stools imbued with a certain animism reminiscent of the local folklore surrounding forests and trees: woodlands as a mystical, breathing ecosystem for human and non-human life alike, as evoked by the 19th century painter John Bauer’s illustrations of trolls, fairies, and gnomes. Employing techniques like the Japanese yakisugi, which preserves the wood through a process of charring, the stools are clustered, like a quorum, evoking their ancestral forms and the knowledge and history that courses through them.

Pernot, for his part, exhibits works from his series Les rêves noirs, landscapes composed of inlays of burnt and painted wood, marble fragments, and gold leaf. The temporal contrasts inherent in these materials, as well as the scenes they depict -such as the fire poppies (a species endemic to California) that only germinate following forest fires- seem to render tangible the otherwise imperceptible scale of geological time. They continually evoke, both through the material and the subjects represented, the episodic phenomena of destruction and rebirth intrinsic to nature.
In parallel, Laurent Pernot presents two previously unseen videos. The first, Burning the Sky, shows a royal condor gliding in the sky, engulfed in flames. The endangered bird symbolizes the wildlife affected by fires -whether natural or human-caused- and recalls the question of survival inherent to all species in the Anthropocene era. At the same time, it also invokes the phoenix, mythology, past civilizations, and the sacred, representing power, immortality, and a connection between the sky and the earth, between humanity and the cosmos. In Les joies invaincues, the artist invites us to the meditative contemplation of collective celebrations captured in archival amateur films, with piano music performed by Vanessa Wagner. Through the luminous projection of these images onto swirls of smoke, as evanescent as they are fleeting, the work questions our relationship to time, memory, and disappearance, while also highlighting the persistence of joy and love as foundational, enlightening, and timeless forces of our existence.