Laurent Pernot Presents "Titans", his Latest Work
As part of the SUITE Program launched by Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) in partnership with Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (ADAGP) and with the support of Fondation des Artistes, Fine Arts faculty Laurent Pernot presents his latest work ‘Titans’ through July 6, 2019, at Espace 36, Saint-Omer, France.
For the fifth year of the SUITE program, the CNAP in partnership with the ADAGP collaborates with two independent galleries run by artists and young curators concerned with new curatorial practices. Their ambition is to bring the spotlight on projects that have benefited from artistic support by the CNAP as a part of an exhibition. This year, Espace 36 is partnering with the Suite program and has the opportunity to work with photographer Laurent Pernot.
Pernot has traveled throughout Europe and America to photograph landscapes that have been exploited by humans to extract mineral resources. In the manner of an inventory, his photographs reveal the sheer vastness of these sites, their geography and their environmental context — in such immensity, human and technological flows are barely distinguishable.
In Greek ancient mythology, Titans is the name given by Hésiode to the original Gods, children of Ouranos the Sky and Gaïa the Earth — two great powers who contributed to the creation of the World. In the artist’s view, these landscapes are the expression and the testimony of greater destructive forces that can lead to the annihilation of vast ecosystems. A decontextualized approach —in time and space— confers these photographs a very peculiar dimension transcending reality and set between. Mineral architectures —shaped by the labour of machines— appear in their purest form.
This project has been selected and supported by the Fondation des Artistes’ patronage Commission.
“My research aims to explore and photograph a mixture of landscapes throughout the world that have been exploited for their resources by modern men. Behind the creative process that led to this work, there is a photograph I took in Brazil in 2011 when I was working on a movie shoot (Ruée vers la perdition) in the Minas Geraïs region. While sighting in a mine, I came across mountain ranges which, demolished mountainsides, resurfacing minerals and so on. In the distance, human flows and machines were barely distinguishable and as soon as the night was coming, you could distinctly hear small explosions. The year after, I travelled to Salt Lake City to photograph the Bigham Canyon — a huge open-cast mine.” Laurent Pernot