"I met Pharrell Williams almost ten years ago when he was curating his 'G I R L' exhibition at Perrotin gallery in 2014. That was when our conversation began and when I started to think about a work in which Pharrell would be the subject. As my work is about revisiting history and playing with science fiction and time travel, I decided to reference his fascination with Napoleon, and to place him in that historical context by drawing inspiration from a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme of an episode during the French Campaign in Egypt. The work I created was part of the series Studies into the Past, a conceptual project about time in which I blur the temporality of what is shown. I replaced the figure of Bonaparte before the Sphinx with that of Pharrell, and included a comet passing through the sky. My paintings sometimes create a sense of floating or an impression of déjà vu. When Pharrell saw the painting for the first time, he seemed taken aback: he told me that his father had given him that name because of his own fascination with the Pharaoh. I didn’t know that. In this new work specially created for Joopiter and the "Just Phriends" sale, Pharrell is in the foreground and the sphinx further back. It's not clear if the scene is taking place in the daytime or at night; there is a rather unusual light. I included the sphere motif this time, a more recent one that appears in some of my works, notably in my film OTTO (2018), like a presence reflecting the invisible side of a sacred place. These spheres show what cannot be seen, what cannot be told, in places that have a certain force, and which my work seeks to analyse." - Laurent Grasso