A multidisciplinary artist, Laurent Pernot develops a body of work at the intersection of video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. His approach explores time, memory and the fragility of existence, while also questioning the relationships between humans and nature. Drawing on literary, poetic and philosophical references, his work creates spaces of suspension conducive to contemplation.
Discovering fragments of love and tenderness in the collections of the musée des lettres anciennes, he retains them as evidence of a permanence of emotions through conflicts. These voices, coming from different eras, form the starting point and the guiding thread of his project.
Quelques mots d'amour…
The works gathered for this carte blanche present, in varied forms, the circulation and persistence of words of love in wartime. With Lettres aux vents, correspondence carried by balloons during the Siege of Paris is reinterpreted on lightweight paper, then assembled into an aerial mobile, where fragments of sentences, highlighted with silver leaf, seem to continue their journey.
Other pieces are anchored in a denser materiality: documents, photographs and texts are collected, transformed and transposed onto different supports, blending eras and voices within a single composition. The words, sometimes extracted from letters by writers or anonymous people, also unfold in space in suspended form, their altered letters evoking the ordeal of time and the violence of conflicts as much as the strength of emotional bonds.
Elsewhere, everyday objects, such as a mailbox frozen in ice, extend this reflection by suggesting a stopped time, where feelings are preserved despite adversity. Finally, fragments of correspondence appear in projected form, creating a continuous flow that brings these ancient words closer to a contemporary language, like a conversation that would continue across time.