After studying photography at Paris VIII University and then film and video at Le Fresnoy, the National Studio for Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, Laurent Pernot has spent the past fifteen years developing an artistic practice that encompasses installation, sculpture, light, writing, and, more recently, painting.
He is interested in topics that transcend both ages and frontiers, such as time, memory, love, and mortality, with a particular focus on impermanence and our relationship with nature. His practice often revolves around references to literature, poetry, and philosophy, sometimes echoing specific places or historical figures (Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Léon Blum, Eugène Delacroix, Emily Dickinson, Françoise Héritier, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, or Fernando Pessoa).
Whether reflexive or meditative, discreet or monumental, Laurent Pernot creates works that invite contemplation, in a timeless space, sometimes playing with appearances and illusions. Combining fragility with beauty, love with eternity, traces with oblivion, and poetry with melancholy, he seeks to provoke reflections on what connects each of us to the grand history and, more generally, to what we call nature.
His works have been exhibited at the Miro Foundation in Barcelona, the Sketch Gallery in London, the Long Museum in Shanghai, the MMOMA in Moscow, the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, the French Embassy in New Delhi, the MUBE in São Paulo, the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in France, the Palais de Tokyo, the Maison Rouge, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Delacroix Museum, the MAC-VAL, the Domaine Pommery, Voyage à Nantes, the ICA Villeurbanne, the LAM Villeneuve-d’Ascq, the Château Toulouse-Lautrec, the Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, and Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Paris and Los Angeles. He has collaborated with Jean-Paul Gaultier as well as with several theater directors and choreographers, and was recently invited by the Musée du Louvre-Lens to be the artistic director and scenographer for an exhibition dedicated to landscape. He has received several commissions for permanent works in public spaces and was the recipient of the SAM Prize for Contemporary Art in 2010. His works are held in museums, foundations, and collections around the world. He is represented by the 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.