Eclats d'amour

Drawing on the museum's collections, and notably on ancient correspondence, Laurent Pernot has conceived an exhibition devoted to « love in wartime  ». By bringing to the surface fragments of intimate words that pass through conflicts, from the Siege of Paris to contemporary periods, he deploys a sensitive vision in which 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 practice explores time, memory and the fragility of existence, while also questioning the relationships between humankind and nature. Drawing on literary, poetic and philosophical references, his work creates spaces of suspension conducive to contemplation. Discovering ancient letters in the museum's collections, he retained fragments of love and tenderness that reveal a permanence of emotions across conflicts. These voices, coming from different eras, form the starting point and the guiding thread of his project.

A few words of love… The works gathered for this carte blanche explore, in varied forms, the circulation and persistence of words of love in wartime. With Lettres aux vents, correspondence carried by balloon during the Siege of Paris is reinterpreted on lightweight paper, then assembled into an airborne 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 taken from letters by writers or anonymous individuals, also unfold in space in suspended form, their altered letters evoking the trial of time and the violence of conflict as much as the strength of emotional bonds. Elsewhere, everyday objects, such as a letterbox frozen in ice, extend this reflection, suggesting a stopped time in which feelings are preserved despite adversity.