Past Exhibitions
Mayan Diary
The Mulhouse Museum of Fine Arts will present the exhibition, Mayan Diary, by Jean-Pierre Sergent. The retrospective, based on a series of monumental works on Plexiglas, is by an artist who developed a repertory of artistic forms in the United States, and continues to expand on these themes in his studio in Besançon, France.
With the exhibition, Mayan Diary, Jean-Pierre Sergent echoes a series which he began in New York a decade ago. Outsized works, which associate and superimpose a formal repertory of works from various pre-industrial cultures, Mayan Diary provides a succinct presentation of a decade of intellectual and artistic research by the artist.
While the artist began his career with a language based on abstract images, “Mayan Diary” also accords major importance to elements that are figurative. Human bodies, often female, evoke by their charged sexuality, images that are symbolic and allegorical. Geometric forms and verbal citations are also part of the universe described by Jean-Pierre Sergent. It is a world that is saturated with information. The codes of communication, associated with each other, but typical to each civilization, function as the fusion of opposed temporalities, assembled in order to write, via serigraphy, histories, which often surpass understanding.
Through the image of this Mayan Journal, in which the word is replaced by the image in order to provoke a visual voyage, the exhibition presented by the Fine Arts Museum of Mulhouse returns to the intellectual process which nourished Jean-Pierre Sergent during his years in America. From small paper prints to imposing silkscreens on Plexiglas, the artist develops in the ambiguity of a work that is both serial and unique, a personal experience which becomes universal and where the assembled forms create novelty.
The continuously work in progress of Jean-Pierre Sergent evokes in a manner that is both informed and documented, a world of perpetual metamorphosis in which life seems to “jaillir,” or to spring forth. To pay homage to this positive life force experienced in voyages and encounters in Mexico, Guatemala, as well as elsewhere in the world, and under the shamanic trances experienced in New York, Jean-Pierre Sergent produces in his artistic work, a cultural synthesis between the corpus of ancestral and contemporary forms. In this respect, the choice of Plexiglas, a definitively contemporary medium, invites us, through the entanglement of transparencies, to embark on a transcending voyage.
PRESS
- Biographie (Français)
- Biography (English)
- Dossier de presse (Français)
- Press Release (English)
- Pressetext (Deutsch)
- Affiche de l'exposition
- Carton d'invitation
- Catalogue de l'exposition
- Vue de l’installation Mayan Diary 20
VISUALS PRESS
1 - INDIAN NAMES : 1999, acrylique sérigraphié sur Plexiglas, 2,45 x 2,45 m.
2 à 10 - MAYAN DIARY : 2007/2010, acrylique sérigraphié sur Plexiglas, 1,40 x 1,40 m.
11 à 15 - LARGE PAPERS : 2007/2010, acrylique sérigraphié sur Papier Rives BFK, 1,20 x 1,07 m.
16 à 20 - MANGAS, YANTRAS Y OTRAS COSAS : 2009/2010, acrylique sérigraphié sur Papier Rives BFK, 0,25 x 0,25 m.
MONTAGE DE L'EXPOSITION
Le 24/03/2011, avec les techniciens du Musée sous la direction de M. Lionel Pinero.
IMPRESSION DU CATALOGUE
Le 31 mars 2011, imprimerie Simon, Ornans, France
VERNISSAGE DE L'EXPOSITION
Le 8 avril 2011, en présence de Mme Nathalie Motte, conseillère municipale et de M. Joël Delaine, conservateur en chef du Musée des Beaux-Arts.
VUES DE L'EXPOSITION