Upcoming
EXHIBITION JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT, "EROTICA / WORKS ON PAPER"
Opening Friday, December 13, 4pm-8pm
Opening hours: 2 pm to 7 pm Wednesday to Saturday, exceptionally Sundays December 15 & 22 and by appointment. The gallery will be closed during the festive season, and you can also make an appointment to meet the artist at the gallery or to visit his Besançon studio's.
CONTACTS
Gallery Keller: Heidi Suter | www.kellergalerie.ch | hs.kellergalerie@gmail.com | + 33 (0)9 56 76 45 54 | + 41(0)79 329 58 56
Jean-Pierre Sergent: contact@j-psergent.com | +33 (0)6 73 44 94 86
DIRECTIONS
ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION
Gallery owner Heidi Suter, who has run two successive galleries in Zurich for almost forty years, is now opening a new exhibition space in the heart of Besançon. For this first show, she will be presenting the work of French-New York artist Jean-Pierre Sergent, who lives and works in Besançon and with whom she has been collaborating for over ten years. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 90s: in the USA, Europe, Iran and China, and in September 2019 to September 2023, a monumental fresco of 72 paintings on Plexiglas, measuring 80 m2, "Les quatre piliers du ciel", was presented at the Besançon Fine-Arts Museum.
On show for the first time: a selection of eight new works on paper (selected from a range of 566 prints), from his brand-new series Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, created during the summer and autumn of 2024. These are one-of-a-kind works, acrylic hand silkscreened with Indian ink highlights on 120g white Gmund Hanf paper, size 100 x 70 cm, as well as on 250g white Rives BFK paper, size 76 x 56 cm. A selection of some twenty small formats from his series Shakti-Yoni: Ecstatic Cosmic Dances (2016 - 2020), 25 x 25 cm, will also be on display, with also a large painting on Plexiglas from the Mayan Diary 2010 series, 1.40 x 1.40 m : Metacosmic Void and the Bindu Point in the Ocean of Pure Consciousness (in reference to a Hindu yantra).
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS NEW SERIES "KARMA*-KALI**, SEXUAL DREAMS & PARADOXES" (read the entire text)
ARCHAIC DIMENSIONS, ORGANIC THOUGHTS, THE WRAP-WRAPPING, GRAFFITI & PATTERNS
"The path of excess leads to the palaces of wisdom." William Blake
My work can be seen as an immense graffiti, as an unforgettable and infinite palimpsest, an immense fresco, unfolding endlessly, from beginning to end, in which the successions of layered images, summoned and silkscreened exist, with their own particular colors, like so many musical notes and successive, vibrating orgiastic scenes, like the enchanted endless waves of the Ocean. It's a whole in itself, a community, a parade of information, as in Nature itself. Sometimes I also mix patterns, geometric designs that are more rational, formally and rationally structured, more culturally and genetically connoted than the purely erotic images. These drawings are like concepts, like structural 'nets' enveloping the erotic image, which is sometimes too overflowing and which, paradoxically, further accentuates the voyeuristic side of the erotic climax-trance. This wrapped-enveloping and veiling/unveiling is a game between the viewer and the images. Indeed, a simple naked body is, de facto, much less erotic and eroticized than a naked woman's body adorned with fine lingerie or fishnet stocking (the ultimate so famous fishnet body stocking), because the latter enhances and emphasizes curves and shapes, overemphasizes and objectifies, in a way, the other's body and, paradoxically, encloses it, too, in its entity as a desirable object of prey… This veiling/unveiling over-transgresses it too, by enveloping it in an external dimension, in a universal abyssal vortex, which is far beyond it... Located, paradoxically, in a wandering, disaffiliation and submission to universal and eternal regenerative desires, an utmost sacred place par excellence... One must look at this full body of creations and blends of images, this indefinable 'being', these entities, as a prayer, an offering, a solicitude, an orgasmic and spiritual presence. The colors have the existence and density of 'this' color and not 'that' color. And each of them are a mixture accumulated over the course of creation, because I assemble and mix them in a unique way, at the very moment of printing, using an old pot of acrylic ink, often still dating from my New York years (i.e. over thirty years old), in which a blue is no longer a blue but a mixture of a multitude of blues, an assembly, an aggregation, a conglomerate of blues... And, where a red, for example, is composed of pigments of mars red, Cadmium Red, Red Iron Oxide and Burnt Sienna etc., with each pigment also intrinsically having a particular geographical origin and chemical composition. Can you imagine where Burnt Sienna pigment comes from? So each printed color has its own tonality and chemical composition, its own unique color resonance!
* KARMA is action in all its forms, then in a more religious sense the ritual action. It is also a notion that commonly designates the cycle of causes and consequences linked to the existence of sentient beings. It is then the sum of what an individual has done, is doing or will do.
** KALI The "Black" is, in Hinduism, the goddess of preservation, transformation and destruction. He who worships her is freed from the fear of destruction. She destroys evil in all its forms and especially the branches of ignorance such as jealousy or passion.
PHOTOS OF THE EXPOSED ARTWORKS
- 1-4, Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, 2024, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on white Gmund Hanf hemp paper (120g), format 120 x 80 cm
- 5-8, Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, 2024 acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on Rives BFK white (250g) & cream (160g) papers, unique print, format 90 x 71 cm
- 9, Mayan Diary #2, 2010, acrylic paint and acrylic silk-screened on Plexiglas, format, 140 x 140 cm
- 10, Beauty Is Energy #5, 2002, acrylic hand silk-screened on BFK Rives paper 250g, unique print, (similar picture), format 90 x 71 cm
- 11-14, Shakti-Yoni, Ecstatic Cosmic Dances, 2018-2020, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on rives BFK paper 250g & yellow Wang Sketching paper 80g, unique print, format 38 x 37,5 cm
FILMED VIDEO AT THE EXHIBITION
VIEWS OF THE GALLERY KELLER EXHIBITION SPACE
PRESS RELEASE