Opening: Friday April 25, 4-8pm and Saturday April 26, 2-6pm (the exhibition will be open to the press on the afternoon of Thursday April 24).
Opening hours: 2 pm to 7 pm Wednesday to Saturday and by appointment. In general, artist JPS is present at the gallery on Saturday afternoons from 3 to 6 p.m. and you can also make an appointment to meet him at the gallery or to visit his studio in Besançon.

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

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- DIRECTIONS                                                                                                                                                                     - POSTER OF THE EXHIBITION

    

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

MYSTICISM, PLEASURE & DEATH, BY JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT, EXHIBITION CURATOR, BESANÇON, FEBRUARY 28, 2025

Curating a group exhibition is not always an easy task, because it means exhibiting and bringing together strong, powerful, individualistic personalities who very often have a strong and powerful ego, as well as a strong will to take on the whole world. The “Bric-à-Brac” exhibition therefore presents a very heterogeneous group of works by artists who are still living or have worked in Besançon over the years, including myself. 
We are all warriors, fighters and survivors, hard-working and tireless, sure of our irrevocable and indescribable decision to be artists and to do what we have to do!  And to create, come what may, and in spite of life's ups and downs, a special, strong, powerful, joyful, irreverent and transcendental work of art.

– GUIMBARDE

First of all, I'd like to say a few words about our dear friend, the painter and lino-gaveur Guimbarde, who sadly passed away just a few months ago. He often came to see me at the studio after shopping at the organic market on Tuesday evenings, and our endless discussions often touched on our artistic creations and our shared difficulties in mounting and selling our work. 
From his works, like an enchanting, magical and marvelous stream, flow the sublime powers of his Christian faith and his soul, so pure and humble, so joyful and intact, untouched by destructive time. He once showed me his “Saint François d'Assises parlant aux oiseaux” (Saint Francis of Assisi speaking to the birds), with the pigeon poised just above his painting, and presented it to me as the 8th marvellous correspondence and coincidence in the World: the bird perched, poised on the frame of his painting, just like that, like an Angel, sent by God! For Guimbarde spoke to the birds on his balcony, to the flowers and to the whole Universe too, and as I write this little text, tears well up in my eyes... Tribute to you dear friend, rest in peace, we won't forget you, and thanks again for all the countless magnificent works you so generously left us and passed on. 

The “Canticle of Brother Sun” by Saint Francis of Assisi:
Praise be to you, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially my brother sun who is the day, and through him you illuminate us.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor, from you, Most High, he bears the sign.
Praise be to you, my Lord, for sister moon and stars, in heaven you formed them clear, precious and beautiful.

– CLAUDIE FLOUTIER

Talking about my friend Claudie's work is both easy and difficult, because we know each other as artistic brothers-in-arms and have been friends for over forty-five years. I remember Claudie showing me, back in the 90s, her “Abois”, which are actually planks of rough wood she had bought in a DIY store and on which she had first pyrographed, then, and painted, in gouache, transcendent images of her dreams, fantasies, anxieties, fears and desires, with her virulent and passionate feminine vital energy as a mother-woman, feminist, anarchist and anti-conformist! 
Her “barks” are, in a way, totems, magical and transcendental objects, which have her height and grandeur, doubles of her physical body, in a way, and of her personality, so strong, so powerful and so unique... They float and dwell in Buddhist bardos*, like souls, animist kamis**, haunting us, inhabiting us and calling out to us from World to World, passers-by beyond the comprehensible, beyond the rational and our poor average person's logical reasoning. 
And every time I see them, I understand absolutely nothing... They speak to me and inhabit my soul, and that's perfect! Because that's how True Art should remain: misunderstood, unsubdued, mysterious, caustic and transcendental. 

* Bardo: Bardo Thôdol: (intermediate state), from thö (to hear) and dol (to liberate), means liberation through hearing during the intermediate stages [between death and rebirth]. “Tibetan Book of the Dead 
** A kami: is a deity or spirit worshipped in the Japanese Shinto religion. Kamis are mostly elements of nature, animals or creative forces of the universe, but can also be spirits of deceased people. Wiki

– ELISABETH BARD

She will present her new works: "The Red Queen Hypothesis", which is a very fine title indeed, in which she throws out and transcribes, on paper, some fragmentary information of organic lives that are reminiscences, like spurts, vagrancy, drawn in a violent, strong but also innocent and childlike way, in bright red colors, this seminal and vital, bloody and sanguine liquid, these organic existences, fragile and ephemeral, without structured forms, other than those embodied at the moment of drawing. Like bits of erect genitals, convulsing vulvas, bits of breasts, mouths, snatches of language and also the blood of a woman's menstruation, life at last, joyful and rebellious! With a few revealing bits of poetry or 'Artaud'-style injunctions... The body and mind have to exult!  

A little anecdote: a long time ago in Montreal, I remember meeting a French artist who happily painted his drawings with the blood from his girlfriend's menstrual periods... 
So, the organic is everywhere, it builds us, it inhabits us all, of course, with its intense joy, its irreverence towards all morals, geometric structures and supernumerary injunctions. And his global intelligence is far more reliable, stronger and more powerful than the rational intelligence of the average Frenchman. 
Here, with Élisabeth's works, we are in a sensitive beyond, in the certain vital and corporeal evidence: of the fragile, the tangible and the infinitely organic!  

– BERTRAND SAULNIER

I've known Bertrand Saulnier's work for many years. Although we're not very close, at each Besançon Biennial I used to enjoy looking at his small works on canvas and paper. [The Biennale des Arts Plastiques de Besançon, a major artistic event, which, unfortunately, the current Municipality has decided not to continue, which is an absolute disaster for all regional artists! end of parenthesis. 
And I've always liked his small formats, because they always exude, firstly, a certain conviction of the essential importance of Art and the History of Art in the face of Life in general; secondly, of the regenerative power of his small paintings and the importance of the image in the face of suffering and solitude! There's courage, too, in his current series: “LES EII” (Études de l'Instinct de l'Instant), with a biting, scathing humorous force that's always present, beyond the simplistic, evanescent self-righteousness of pop culture and contemporary art. 
There's a truth, a precision and an accuracy to her colors, drawings and shapes that have, at times, a disturbing presence, a fluid, ephemeral and ethereal beauty.Her little paintings are often tragic-comic, intrinsically, with a real reason for being and existing, despite everything and against everything!
It's a profoundly humanistic work of great wisdom and detachment, something that only Art or mysticism can allow us mortals to mock suffering, gods and Death, or even the sacrificial, suffering body! To come back to it, his works, each time, act like a revelation through a hallucinatory delirium, a little Boschian, a little Sutinian, a little whimsical, as if they had all been created in a second, ecstatic state, out of gravity, and they take us with them! 

– JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT

As for me, I'll be presenting some mystical works at this group show.
This term is a bit overused and difficult to define, but according to Wikipedia: “Mysticism is that which has to do with mysteries, hidden or secret things. The term belongs mainly to the spiritual realm and is used to qualify or designate inner experiences of the order of contact or communication with a transcendent reality not discernible by the common sense.”
It's true that, having had the good fortune to be initiated into certain mystical experiences and revelations in Egypt, Mexico and Guatemala, and of course, having been able to perform shamanic trances, under hypnosis, in New York, I'm now familiar with talking about these experiences, in order to share them with a wide audience. 
During these trances, not only do we leave our body, our weight, our gravity, as Simone Veil* so aptly put it, but we enter successive kaleidoscopic layers of universes teeming with solar, lunar, comic, sexual and transcendental energies. These are our parallel worlds, the world of anchorites, saints and Marguerite Porete's** great ultimate freedom.
This is the World of the Ancestors and the Dead, of the energies that compose us all and also decompose us: Nature, the Earth, the Indian Goddesses Kali and Durga***, not named but present and active. 
In these trances, as in my painting, we are in the World without illusions, without pretensions, quite humbly... wedged into Life and Death, Sexes and Skeletons entwined, tangled up in initiatory dreams too! Like every human being, like the Buddha awake, present, in his state of eternal enlightenment and satori****. Being, there, in his work, in his Art, floating, enjoying, in full freedom, in full awareness of the World and all that nourishes and composes it: Color, Light, Day, Night, the Sea, the Sexes, the Ocean, the Sun and all the Stars... Alea jacta est! 

* “How do we escape what, in us, resembles gravity?” By grace only. God crosses the infinite thickness of time and space to come to us; his grace changes nothing in the blind games of necessity and chance that drive this World: it penetrates our souls like a drop of water that insinuates itself through your geological layers without modifying their structure, and there it waits in silence for us to consent to becoming God again. Weight & Grace, Simone Weil
** Marguerite Porete, mystic and Christian woman of letters of the beguine movement, born around 1250 and burned on June 1, 1310 in the Place de Grève in Paris, with her fabulous book “Le Miroir des Âmes Simples et Anéanties”. “Chapter 7. How noble this soul is, and how it takes no account of anything.
Love: This soul takes no account of shame, nor of honor, nor of poverty, nor of wealth, nor of ease, nor of discomfort, nor of love, nor of hate, nor of hell, nor of paradise. [...] Then this soul, which has become nothing, possesses everything and yet possesses nothing, wants everything and wants nothing, knows everything and knows nothing.”
*** “These images (of Kali) strip reality bare, they stimulate the expansion of consciousness and provoke extraordinary experiences, rich in spiritual content. They seem to arise from an irrational background, but at the same time they fit rationally within rational limits.” 
The Way of Tantra: Art - Science - Ritual, Ajit Mookerjee
**** Satori: “to understand, to realize” is a Japanese Zen Buddhist term for spiritual awakening. Wiki

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THE EXPOSED ARTISTS & WHAT ABOUT THEIR EXHIBITED ART WORKS

 

– ELISABETH BARD (born in Paris, 1957) [mail - website]

– BIOGRAPHY

Elisabeth Bard, painting.

 Drawings - inks - prints - paintings - artist's books - installations - performances

Her work develops a dialogue between space, gesture and line. The randomness and necessity of line. Research in hand, simultaneously with execution.
 She delves into pictorial space or, more broadly, plastic space, to reveal rhythm, transparency, tense assertions, multiple readings of planes, sensitive architectures, a writing of the perceived world perhaps. 
She seeks an essential displacement of meaning and space, a possible poetic percussion. Her work is exhibited in France, Switzerland and Belgium. She has recently left a large studio in Nods (Haut Doubs) to live and work in Besançon, Paris and elsewhere.

- ABOUT HER SERIES: "THE RED QUEEN HYPOTHESIS"

Laying down ink, experiencing the organicity of line, in small forms, letting what grows in the drawing rise, in the sense of a plant, a germ, in the sense of what grows and unfolds.

Random architecture, body language, an indocile and joyful sensuality, red, an interiority and a skin... in relation. 
“The Red Queen Hypothesis”. During a scientific discussion, words grab me. Words are grappling hooks. The “red queen hypothesis” is a hypothesis of evolutionary biology, proposed in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen, which can be summed up as follows: the permanent evolution of a species is necessary to maintain its aptitude in the face of the evolutions of the species with which it coevolves (...)”. These little forms have become my red queens, sensitive, carnal fragments that coevolve in a tense necessity between them, between them and me, me and them, between outside and inside, here and far away. They are, subject to atmospheric pressures, to the movements of life, while affirming their singular essence. They multiply over time. For the first time, I'm handing them over to the public, with whom they will continue to co-evolve. They are not only inscribed in a biological machinery, they inhabit the necessary mobility of being and being With. 
Besançon, February 2025, Élisabeth Bard

- HER EXHIBITED WORKS :

- 1 - 9, La série "Hypothèse de la reine rouge", 15 pièces sur 35, 50 et plus ; encre et graphite sur papier simili japon ou sur Awagami, format encadré : 18 x 16 cm ou 16 x 18 cm
- 10, Atelier de Nods, (2010 - 2024), le 9 novembre 2024

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– CLAUDIE FLOUTIER (born in Meynes Gard, celebrated her 20th birthday in 1968 !) [mail]

– BIOGRAPHY

I studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, then in Paris at Lucien Couteau's studio.
An early ecologist (my ex-husband was René Dumont's assistant at Agro), I divide my time between Paris and Besançon, where I rediscover nature.
Very involved as a woman artist and teacher, in the 80s I took part in “Création Femmes”, which enabled us, among other events, to put the spotlight on Artmisa gentileschi*, thanks to Françoise Eliet, psychoanalyst, writer and critic for “Art Press” in those years.
As the years have gone by, I've stayed the same. Although I have few illusions about the future of the world, my artistic parentheses reflect my feelings as a woman sensitive to what is happening to us.

* Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) was an Italian painter of the Caravaggesque school. One of the most accomplished of her generation. Many of her paintings express a feminine point of view, denouncing male violence against women. This artistic bias, along with her brilliant career, made her an admired figure in contemporary feminist movements. (Wiki)

- ABOUT HER WORK

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who liked to tell herself stories, which she captioned with drawings, paintings and other motley constructions.
Once upon a time, there was a lady who invented a character perfectly suited to all these fantasies.
Her name is Trobeïrice and she lives on beyond the years. 
Without chronology, with the help of various supports, Trobeïrice writes, says poems, performs, sets up her little compositions, entertains herself.
The series is called “Abois”, dating back to a long time ago and made up of engraved wooden boards superimposed with more recent “Cartons plein”... perhaps in remembrance of the village lottos of my native Languedoc.
Besançon, February 7, 2025, Claudie Floutier

- HER EXHIBITED ART WORKS: 

- 1, 2, Claudie Floutier & Heidi Suter, lors du choix des œuvres à exposer, atelier de l'artiste, Besançon le 31 janvier 2025.
- 3 - 8, les "Abois", pyrogravure, gouache et techinque mixte sur planche de bois, 169 x 9 cm, présentés avec, au-dessus, les "Cartons peints", gouache sur carton entoilé, 19,5 x 25 cm (années 2010)
- 9, 10, Avec J-P Sergent à l'atelier de Claudie lors du tournage d'Univers d'artistes #1, Entretiens avec Claudie Floutier, (4 parties), 9 juin 2023.
- 11, Entretiens avec Claudie Floutier à l'atelier de JPS, Art, sagesses & bribes de souvenirs communs (3 parties), 29 septembre 2019.

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– GUIMBARDE (1950-2024) [daughter's email Fanny]

 

– BIOGRAPHY

Noël GIRARD-CLOS, known as “Guimbarde”, was born on December 27, 1950, in Delle, in the Territoire de Belfort. His nickname refers to the musical instrument of the same name, which he played so well.

Inspired by nature and music from an early age, he built his life by devoting himself fully and passionately to Art. As a traveler, he was open to the world and to different cultures, particularly when he lived on Reunion Island in the 70s.

A student at the Besançon School of Fine Arts, Guimbarde has participated in numerous exhibitions, notably in Besançon and in his beloved Franche-Comté region.

Simple, authentic and wholehearted, Guimbarde was an atypical character. A devout believer, he saw himself as a 'pilgrim-Christian' artist, and attached great importance to his faith.

He passed away on October 30, 2024, at the age of 73, leaving behind a rich and colorful cultural heritage.

- HIS EXHIBITED ART WORKS: 

- 1, "Elie sur son char de feu", linogravure sur papier, année 2000-2023 ?, 47 x 72 cm, édition de 20 ? [cette scène du premier testament de la Bible représente le départ du prophète Élie au Ciel, laissant son manteau, signe d’Alliance, à Élisée, son disciple.]
- 2, "L’assomption de la Vierge Marie", plaque de linogravure peinte, années 2000-2023 ?, 100 x 75 cm, [une des dernières créations de Guimbarde représentant l’assomption de Marie auprès de Dieu, symbole d’espérance et d’invitation à vivre sous sa protection et dans la Foi.]
- 3, "Nu rose", huile sur toile, 64 x 52 cm, 1985, [incarnation de la beauté et du désir, ce portrait met en lumière la beauté et la fraîcheur de cette femme aux courbes arrondies.]
- 4, "Saint François d’Assises parlant aux oiseaux", plaque de linogravure peinte, années 2000-2023 ?, 92 x 68 cm [Frère des plus pauvres et des blessée de la vie, St François d’Assises témoignait de la tendresse de Dieu autour de lui et se réjouissait de bonheurs simples et des merveilles de la Nature.]
- 5,6, Guimbarde devant son "Saint François", avec détail étonnant, le pigeon sur sa toile dans son appartemenet de Besançon, Rue du Séchal, quartier Battant à Besançon, photo qu'il était très fier de nous montrer !
- 7, JPS avec son ami Guimbarde au vernissage de l'exposition "Les Quatre Piliers du Ciel", MBAA de Besançon, le 16 novembre 2019.

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– BERTRAND SAULNIER (born in 1966) [mail - facebook]
 

– BIOGRAPHY

Lives and works in Besançon and wherever possible. Has exhibited regularly since 1986.

- HIS EXHIBITED ART WORKS:

LES EII (Etudes de l'Instinct de l'Instant)

"The present is just a bit of the past looking for a future." Ilnée Seppalat.

On December 31, 2014, after a particularly unfortunate car accident, I decided, alongside my current work (paintings, drawings, photos, volume...), to produce at least one small study a day. These are pragmatically annotated with a series of significant numbers and letters. They are created in a Technique Mixte sur Papier (TMP), measuring 125 x 75 millimeters.

In their execution, they have no other aims or rules than to follow and obey the “instinct of the moment”.

To date (May 2023), over 3,000 studies have been carried out.

 

- 1, "Cyborg (E1409)", technique mixte sur papier, encadré 32 x 24 cm, 2018.
- 2, "Prochain festin (E1413)", technique mixte sur papier, encadré: 30,5 x 23 cm, 2018
- 3, "Mécanique du désir (E2355)", technique mixte sur papier, encadré: 32,5 x 26 cm, 2021
- 4,"Mamma manucure (E2377)", technique mixte sur papier, encadré: 25 X 31,5 cm, 2021
- 5, "Géographie incertaine", technique mixte, encadré, 50 x 40 cm, 2023
- 6, "Le silence dans nos têtes (E2724), technique mixte sur carton, encadré: 42 x 34 cm, 2022
- 7, "Nouveaux rois; nouveau monde", technique mixte sur papier encadré 32 x 23,5 cm, 2018
- 8, "Glacier et volcan (E2388)", technique mixte sur papier, 31 x 25 cm, 2021
- 9, "Au cirque (E2381)", technique mixte sur papier, encadré: 27 x 23 cm), 2021
- 10, "Alice est à nouveau en retard (E2453)", technique mixte sur papier, encadré 24 x 32 cm, 2021

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– JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT (Né en 1958 à Morteau)

– BIOGRAPHY

French-New-York painter (1993-2003), now living and working in Besançon. His serigraphic works of paint on Plexiglas and paper have been exhibited internationally since the 90s: in Canada, the United States, Europe, Iran and China since 2016.
Her work is both a marvel at life and its transience, and a vibrant tribute to the colossal energy of life in its human-cultural continuity and timeless cosmic infinity: a gushing presence of erotic desire from the mists of time and cosmic-mystical beauty.

- HIS EXHIBITED ART WORKS: "THE MYSTICAL WORKS: ONE PAINTING ON PLEXIGLASS & NINE SMALL FORMATS ON PAPER

 

THE MIRROR OF DAY AND NIGHT*

- "The Earth is the region of the fleeting and ephemeral moment." Ayocuan, poète Nàhuatl

This painting on Plexiglas Mayan Diary #12, from 2010, is a deep, dark space, like a Nuit* in which, however, there is a dull, radiant light, a little twilight and pre-yawning, like a dawn of hope. It has been hanging on my large wall of paintings in my studio since 2019, and many friends have noticed it because it creates a kind of black hole in the surface space with all the other paintings assembled on my wall. Now, I like diversity in my wall installations, but this is like the most 'mystical' painting I've ever done.
Indeed, thanks to its presence and immanent power, it exudes a magical, poetic and incantatory purity, unlike my other paintings, whose energies are more strongly colored and frontally sexual... The green-blue-night shapes and colors, with two different kinds of black and a sumptuous green pattern, are very sensitive, a little fragile, a little hesitant, ephemeral and 'divine', looking a little like, at the very place and moment when, the God Vishnu** rests, drowsy, in the Cosmic Night, before going to churn the Milk Ocean***, at the beginning of Time, to recreate the World. 
It's a painting from before Life, before Chaos, perhaps even before the Great Whole; it's the Birth and the beginning of the Awakening of the World. It's a painting in which the Aztec sacrifice of the Sun is organized, and in which all the cosmic links are forged, linking together all the Beings of future Worlds, in an awakening, a consciousness, an ecstasy that is completely and intensely cosmic.

* They thought light and shadow were the same opposites, they didn't just see light against a background of darkness. “Weaving for the Sun: Ancient Andean Textiles”, Rebecca Stone-Miller

** Vishnu is known for his many avatars. He is the principal deity of Vishnuism.

*** The Churning of the Sea of Milk, the creative event under the aegis of the god Vishnu, is part of Hindu cosmogonic mythology. In addition to the emergence of divine beings, creatures and wondrous objects, the Churning enables the gods to become immortal...

 

- 1, "Mayan Diary #12", peinture acrylique sérigraphiée et acrylique peinte au dos de plaques de Plexiglas, encadré : 1,40 x 1,40 m, 2010

- 2 - 10, "Shakti-Yoni, Ecstatic Cosmic Dances", acrylique sérigraphiée et réhauts à l'encre de Chine sur papier Rives BFK blanc 250g et Wang jaune 80g, tirages uniques, 38 x 37,5 cm, 2017-2019

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