Éclats d’amour – Carte blanche à Laurent Pernot

A multidisciplinary artist, Laurent Pernot develops work at the crossroads of video, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. His approach explores time, memory, and the fragility of existence, while also questioning relationships between humanity and nature. Steeped in literary, poetic, and philosophical references, his work establishes suspended spaces suited for contemplation.

Discovering historical letters in the museum collections, he selected fragments of love and tenderness that reveal the enduring nature of human emotion across conflict. These voices, drawn from across eras, form the starting point and guiding thread of his project.

A few words of love…

The works assembled for this carte blanche explore, through varied forms, the circulation and persistence of love letters in wartime. In Lettres aux vents, correspondence carried by balloon during the Siege of Paris is reimagined on delicate paper and assembled into an aerial mobile, where phrase fragments, enhanced with silver leaf, seem to continue their journey.

Other works are rooted in denser materiality: documents, photographs, and texts are gathered, altered, and transferred onto various media, blending eras and voices within the same composition. Words, occasionally taken from letters by celebrated authors or anonymous correspondents, also float suspended in space, their weathered lettering evoking the passage of time and the violence of war as much as the strength of emotional bonds.

Elsewhere, everyday objects, such as a mailbox encased in ice, deepen this reflection by suggesting a suspended time where sentiments remain preserved despite hardship. Finally, fragments of correspondence appear projected, creating a continuous flow connecting historical words with contemporary language, like a conversation extending across time.