Laurent Pernot

"But the sea takes

and gives memory,

and love fixes the eye diligently,

and poets establish

that which endures."

—Friedrich Hölderlin, “Remembrance” (c. 1800 to 1804)

Galerie Marguo is very pleased to present We are miserable, but love, suddenly, saves us, an exhibition of new paintings and text-based works by Laurent Pernot.

The Romantic poets sought to articulate the monumentality of nature and historical time through the subjectivities of the individual, experienced via minute impressions and emotions that shape the human condition and our experience of this world. Pernot’s work echoes the Romantic impulse to synthesize the ordinary and sublime through lyricism and metaphor. For nearly two decades, he has been developing a distinctive formal language, nourished by literature, poetry, and mythology that probes questions of eternity, ephemerality, and memorialization across a wide array of media. Particularly important to the artist are the influential roles of fragility and love in such matters. These motifs course through his practice, like veins through marble, which are in themselves mere traces, formed by crystallized minerals deposited by water that once ran through the stone and evaporated.

A sensitivity to the ontological energies of materials is demonstrated in the thirteen new paintings from the series The Contemplations, inspired by Victor Hugo’s collection of poems by the same name that experimented with the idea of an autobiography in verse, drawn from the author’s memory and quotidian experiences.The pictorial abstractions are meticulously composed of inlaid wood and sourced scraps of marble that brim with the subtle tension of contrasting temporalities and temperatures inherent to these ancient materials. The washes of pigment that tint the wood indicate the accretive character of memory, with each new experience or passing moment coloring the ones before it. The depicted images are extracted from a wide range of art historical sources and techniques, from traditional Japanese stamps to Félix Vallotton, with varying degrees of legibility. On the whole, The Contemplations can be seen as units of an oneiric time, in which disparate geographies, eras, cultures and tempos have been suspended, or flattened into one plane, as though in a dream.

The unstable and fragmentary nature of memory is alluded to repeatedly across the exhibition through Pernot’s use of quotation and excerption. In Poems, a suite of text-based canvases, language itself becomes a medium upon which the distortions of time and transference act. The artist has selected passages from love poems by Rimbaud, Keats, Woolf, Aragon, and Novalis among others, lifting the text and transferring it to the canvas using a heat-based process. The materiality of the page is evoked in the aleatory creases or crumples that obscure, once again, the full legibility of the source, beckoning the viewer to fill in the blanks in their mind.

Finally, a neon installation, from which the exhibition takes its title, anchors the collection of ideas gathered here, citing the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, an enduring source of inspiration for Pernot. Partially hand-painted in black ink directly onto the walls of the gallery, the sculpture is installed in situ, linking it to the time-space of its exhibition. Its neon elements read: “We Love Us”. For Pernot, like the marriage of marble and wood in The Contemplations, the universally abundant chemical of neon ensconced in hand blown glass offers a metaphor of the fragile, yet enduring and powerful force of memory, cast in the glow of love.

Laurent Pernot (b. 1980) lives and works in Paris. He earned an MA in Photography and Multimedia from Paris VIII University, and attended Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing, France. Pernot has exhibited widely in France and abroad and has been the recipient of many public art commissions. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘L’instant d’une vie’, Château Malromé (2022, Saint-André-du-Bois); ‘Antinoüs, Antinoüs ’ jardin Arnaud Beltrame & Galerie Marguo, (2021, Paris); ‘Compared with one moment of love’, 4x4 project, RX Gallery (2021, Paris); ‘I am looking for a place where nobody ever dies’, Pavillon Vendôme (2021-21, Aix-en-Provence); ‘Titans’, espace 36 (2019, Saint-Omer); ‘The land where trees dream’, Place Royale (2017, Nantes); and ‘A Fraction of Infinity’, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2015, Moscow). Select group exhibitions include: ‘Le grand tour’, Musée Mandet, (2022, Riom); ‘Laniakea’, Fondation La Ruche-Seydoux (2022, Paris); ‘Le temps suspendu’, Musée-château, (2022, Annecy); ‘Le vent se lève’, MAC VAL (2021, Vitry-sur-Seine); ‘Blooming’, Domaine Pommery (2021, Reims); 'Métamorphoses', Maison des Arts, (2020, Chevilly-Larue); ‘The moon’, Grand Palais (2019, Paris); ‘Dans l’atelier - la création à l’oeuvre’, Musée Eugène Delacroix (2019, Paris); and ‘Processus, Espace 13/16, Centre Pompidou (2017, Paris).