Mathieu Pernot — La traversée — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 11 → May 18, 2014

Entretien — Mathieu Pernot Invité au Jeu de Paume et à la Maison rouge, Mathieu Pernot revient avec nous sur les généalogies de ses nombreux travaux. L’occasion de cerner les démarches d’un photographe qui s’inscrit dans la pure tradition documentaire tout en y injectant de nouveaux codes, très personnels.

Mathieu Pernot was born in Fréjus in 1970 and he currently lives and works in Paris. After studying art history at the University of Grenoble, he enrolled at the École Nationale de la Photographie in Arles, from where he graduated in 1996. He specialises in documentary work, but offers a new take on the codes of this photographic genre and explores alternative paths to develop a multi-voiced narrative. Mathieu Pernot’s work is either organised into series — sometimes linked by their choice of characters, chronology or theme — or by his encounter with archive images. In either case, his nomadic approach to photography and choice of subject underline a desire to avoid a uniform and unidirectional narrative. His images in perpetual movement evoke a reality that is far from being fixed and unchanging.

The exhibition at the Jeu de Paume presents a selection of Mathieu Pernot’s series from the last twenty years. It inaugurates a new kind of installation, which aims to encourage dialogue between the many images and objects and takes the visitor on a journey through his body of work ending up with his latest work Fire, produced especially for the exhibition.

Whether through his own photographic work or the use of different archive photos and documents, Mathieu Pernot questions the diversity of means of representation and the very notion of how we make use of the photographic medium.

An underlying sense of movement, of passing through or crossing over is omnipresent in his work and a recurrent element of this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. It is embodied both in the fragile and nomadic nature of the characters his photos portray — gypsies, migrants, etc. — and the repeated presence of these same individuals throughout his entire body of work, transforming them into the characters of stories criss-crossing the passing of time.