Eclats d'amour

Drawing from the museum's collections, particularly ancient correspondences, Laurent Pernot has conceived an exhibition dedicated to “love in times of war”. By bringing forth fragments of intimate words traversing conflicts, from the Siege of Paris to contemporary periods, he unfolds a sensitive vision where the persistence of emotional bonds confronts history and the passage of time.

A multidisciplinary artist, Laurent Pernot develops a body of work at the crossroads of video, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. His approach explores time, memory, and the fragility of existence, while also questioning the relationship between humans and nature.

Drawing on literary, poetic, and philosophical references, his work creates spaces of suspension conducive to contemplation.

Upon discovering old letters in the museum's collections, he selected fragments of love and tenderness that reveal the permanence of emotions through conflicts. These voices, from different eras, form the starting point and guiding thread of his project.

A few words of love… The works brought together for this carte blanche exhibition explore, in various forms, the circulation and persistence of words of love in times of war.

With "Lettres aux vents", correspondences transported by balloons during the Siege of Paris are reinterpreted on lightweight paper then assembled into an aerial mobile, where fragments of sentences, enhanced with silver leaf, seem to continue their journey.

Other pieces are rooted in a denser materiality: documents, photographs, and texts are collected, transformed, and transposed onto different media, blending eras and voices in a single composition.

The words, sometimes extracted from letters by writers or anonymous individuals, also unfold in space in suspended form, their altered letters evoking the test 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 correspondences appear in projected form, creating a continuous flow that brings these ancient words closer to a contemporary language, like an ongoing conversation.