After studying photography at the University of Paris VIII and video the Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, Laurent Pernot has been developing a polymorphous body of work over the past fifteen years. His artistic practice today encompasses a wide variety of media, including video, photography, painting, installation, sculpture and new technologies.
His work explores themes of time, memory and disappearance, with a poetic and existential dimension. Laurent Pernot is particularly interested in questions of impermanence, the fragility of existence, and the relationship between man and nature. His visual language often revolves around references to literature, poetry and philosophy, sometimes resonating with places, objects or historical figures (Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Léon Blum, Eugène Delacroix, Émilie Dickinson, Françoise Héritier, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Fernando Pessoa, etc.).
Through interdisciplinary installations, whether discreet or monumental, Laurent Pernot proposes visual and conceptual elements that imply a dimension of contemplation, a certain attention to matter and form, but also to the writing. His exhibitions often engage the viewer into a timeless, suspended world, as a photographic experience, playing with our perception.
Combining impermanence with the beauty of the world, love with eternity, memory with oblivion, or celebration with melancholy, his works confront us with the paradoxes that inhabit us; they invite to rethink our shared memory and nature, meditating on our relationship with the long time as opposed to the ephemeral destiny of the human being.
His work has notably been exhibited at the Miro Foundation in Barcelona, the Sketch Gallery in London, the Long Museum in Shanghai, MMOMA in Moscow, the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, the French Embassy in New Delhi, MUBE in São Paulo and the Espace culturel Louis Vuitton in France, Palais de Tokyo, Maison Rouge, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée Delacroix, MAC-VAL, Domaine Pommery, Voyage à Nantes, ICA Villeurbanne, LaM Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Château Toulouse-Lautrec, Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, Saint Laurent Rive Droite Paris and Los Angeles. He has collaborated with Jean-Paul Gauthier as well as with several dance and theater directors, and was recently invited to be artistic director and scenographer for an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre-Lens. Laurent Pernot has received several commissions for permanent works in public spaces, and was the laureate of the prestigious SAM Prize for Contemporary Art in 2010. His work can be found in museums, foundations and collections around the world, he is represented by Marguo Gallery in Paris.
No man is master of the wind, each one holds his sail as best he can. Laurent Pernot
How great are the storms stirred up by man, that little animal who vanishes like smoke! Erasmus (Complainte de la paix, 1516)
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Extract from an interview with Bernard Le Magoarou, Centre des Monuments Nationaux magazine, #13, 2022 :
What are your sources of inspiration?
First of all, I’d say poetry and philosophy. I’ve always been sensitive to the relationship between the two, just as I’ve always been attracted to authors who share a certain philosophy of the human condition, such as Lucretius, Hölderlin, Novalis, Emily Dickinson, Edouard Glissant or Virginia Woolf, for example. Secondly, when you’re an artist, creation is a daily task, and inspiration a state of alertness that encourages constant observation. Anything can be the source or subject of a project, from the contemplations of nature to the irruptions of chance. Finally, I’d like to mention love, an essential source in my life and a force that, like the current of a stream, turns the wheels and waters the flowers on its banks. Loving raises us above a reality that sometimes overtakes the imaginary.