X 174 KARMA-KALI, SEXUAL DREAMS & PARADOXES | WHITE GMUND HANF HEMP PAPER, 2024

X 174 Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes | white Gmund Hanf hemp paper | Summer & Fall 2024

New series Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on white Gmund Hanf hemp paper (120g), format 100 x 70 cm

NEW CONJUNCTIONS: A CARTOGRAPHY OF CHOSEN WORLDS, ENERGIES, SPIRITUALITIES DESIRED, DREAMED OF & DEVELOPED IN MY NEW WORK DURING SUMMER 2024 [kindly edited by Johnes Ruta]

ARCHAIC DIMENSIONS, ORGANIC THOUGHTS, THE WRAP-WRAPPING, GRAFFITI & PATTERNS

"Dawn breaks
and flowers open
the gates of paradise."

Saimu, "Japanese Farewell Poems (Poems written on the threshold of death)", Yoel Hoffmann

"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! 

This silkscreen work of accumulation, which is also sometimes quite physically tiring, is always experienced as a real battle to be waged against the absurd and nothingness, and it advances, it develops towards and into the light and the attainment of a kind of state of satori* and throughout a mystico-erotic trance, in a voluntary annulment of the ego, of all cultural and aesthetic apriori and of all vulgar, commercial or pornographic figurative representation. I use such pornographic images as a base, in the manner of primary material, like bricks, assembled through a truly tantric technique, to deny, destroy, annihilate, strip away, fuck them up and strip them out of all their mercantile, ostentatious, pop, teasing and vulgar content... To twist and transmute them into an essence, a true living, vital and spiritual energy, erupting alchemically and shamanically in explosive outbursts of pure Life... insurgent, ejaculatory, insubordinate, anarchic and primordial. For knowledge of the work's 'true truth' is essential to access its 'true presence'.

My work is deeply rooted in time, thanks to my layering technique (successively adding and accumulating one layer of image on top of another) and also, mixing layers of colored Indian ink with the images, until I obtain an 'ecstatic' painting in which something emerges and happens: a presence, a particular light that perhaps springs forth ...? Works that can also resemble the deliberate and successive accumulation of graffitis (or another example: prehistorical Cave Art), which are almost always drawn and engraved collectively on anonymous, anodyne surfaces, on common, hidden walls: public toilets, the inhospitable, neutral, ugly, grey and vulgar walls of cities and suburbs; surfaces in front of which we innocently go to piss and shit, because the body is fully liberated there, there is no more morality, just the need to piss and taking a shit or to masturbate, and where the essential presence of the body is unmistakable, undeniable and ineffaceable!

Places where individuals, one after the other, often express themselves in an erotic, ejaculatory bodily extension: the spermic drawing, without precise thought, without intention, totally outside any aesthetic frame-work, other than those imposed by the necessities of the body itself, in its overcoming and its geographical, social and spatial displacement: getting out of the shit, its smell and its condition of poor mortality. And also, in the immense hope of annihilating suffering, solitude and individual confinement: “I paint therefore I am and I ejaculate!” and I exist in pleasure and in the encounter with my desire and into all my supernumerary erotic dreams...: "AND I'LL SCREW YOU ALL!" Finally exploding enjoyably in the desired other: vulvas, breasts, mouths or assholes... objects of fantasy and places of enchantment, erasures and final exhaustion, as in orgasm... of this suffering and this individual solitude, in this movement towards an endless fusional within others and elsewhere... 

For there is in the graffiti, as in my work moreover, this inextinguishable desire to share, to communicate, to raise awareness: I'm a man who wants to ejaculate, to drown in countless juicy, wet vulvas, but also in the cosmos or in erotic dreams themselves, in order to rediscover a primitive force, an archaic energy, a full and complete reason for living, as perhaps dreamt of often? in some other cultures of the past, in the ancient mythologies and spiritualities, which were meaningful and regenerative, not only for gods and goddesses but also for men and women, and which are, to this day, in our contemporary, almost pre-apocalyptic time period; well and truly abandoned, forgotten and lost forever! Where have Dionysus, Pan, Isis, Bâ** and the ânkh*** gone? or even, closer to us, the beautiful Song Lines, the songs tracks**** of the Australian aborigines?

Jean-Pierre Sergent, October 17th 2024
 

* Satori: "to understand, to realize" is a Buddhist term for spiritual awakening. The literal meaning of the Japanese word is “understanding”. It is not intellectual understanding, but direct physical understanding.
** Ba: is an immaterial component of gods and human beings. This concept is translated as "soul" or "soul-Ba". The Ba represents the energy of movement, dialogue and transformation.
*** The ânkh: cross of life, key of life, is a hieroglyph representing the word ˁnḫ, meaning "life" to the ancient Egyptians. (Wiki)
**** Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

KARMA*-KALI**, SEXUAL DREAMS & PARADOXES

"What light outside life? Is He in or out of this mass of images? [...]
Transcendence demands - your fear of being shredded. "***

The Art must taste like jizz and sulfur or both at the same time! Otherwise, it is only fragmentary and demonstrative representation of emotional and sentimental memories of times gone by and lost forever. 
The Art is the present. In the same way as our erotic dreams which reintegrate us, sometimes well in spite of us, in the incommensurable encompassing matrix of the Living. In the great mechanism: sex-life-birth-death: construction versus destruction. The very function and role, precise and exact, of the Indian goddess Kali the Black, fierce and regenerating. Wearing naked, red tongue stretched out of her mouth and eyes exorbitant, a necklace of skulls of the dead while sexually enjoying on the body of Shiva with her Yoni wide open, to destroy and resurrect it. A bit like the Mexican mother goddess Coatlicue or Isis and Osiris... As well as in every human sexual act: creation then destruction of the ego to give birth to pleasure, enjoyment, annihilation.
Obviously, sex and its representations disturb because they make us perceive the great emptiness, the great organic chaos of the comic mechanisms of which the human dreams, during its nights, during these dreams of ejaculatory fusions in and with the other, of which the opposite and complementary sex is awaited and hoped for: to be reborn or to make reborn.
"Thousands of times before - I have lived in a mother's womb - I have enjoyed a great variety of foods - And I was suckled at so many mother's breasts - I was born, and died again - And continually, I was reborn once more."****  
The sperm*****, being then, not like an ejaculatory defilement but like an archaic leaven: reincarnations, transmigrations and immemorial transmissions in the supernumerary myriads of Yonis, welcoming and complicit vulvas.

Somewhere it is necessary, as for the strong, brutal and incompressible energies of Karma and Kali; to use in my work, this creative state of conjunctions, of accumulations of bodily, energetic, foutatory forces. To thus upset my mortal state, as well as the ambient state of a capitalist, materialistic society in full decline, in full dishonour and which forces and submits each one of us, each living being, in a somber individualism, isolating and destructive.

An image is of course, intrinsically, only a representation. But it can sometimes be the powerful revelation of an organic nature more violent, truer and wilder than the represented subject... And the accumulation of pornographic images, informal and jouissif Eros, mixed and interpenetrating with repetitive patterns, geometrical, structured, chanted like mantras; creates or recreates our vital paradox, our incantatory lifeline. 

We live and evolve de facto, within well-structured frameworks by religious or atheistic thought, economic, aesthetic and moral constraints... In these times of terrible revolution for Iranian and Afghan women, let's think strongly of them, amicably and confraternally: "Woman, life, freedom!" For it is necessary that the Body or Bodies, imperatively interact today, within these structures and these dictates of submission, to reform them and hopefully soften them... In order to open a new way, towards a deeper freedom, more in fusional, spiritual and animistic harmony with all the Forces, all the Truths of the Living and Nature.
And then, it is also a whole; a totality: Stones... Stags and Human Souls... travelling in the infinite. SILENTIUM EST******.

Jean-Pierre Sergent, Besançon, November 17, 2022

* 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. 
*** Indian journals, Allen Ginsberg
**** Garbha #4, 108 Upanishads, Martine Buttex
***** "Semen puts the Hindu in a state of mystical jubilation. He sees his goddesses covered with it." A Barbarian in Asia, Henri Michaux
****** Silentium est: "It is silent.", sentence from a medieval manuscript