Documentary film presenting the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent drawing with Indian ink on positive films, the images of his new series: Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes. Filmed by the artist on June 30, 2024.

Documentary film presenting the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent drawing with Indian ink on positive films, the images of his new series: Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes. Filmed by the artist on June 30, 2022.

Documentary film presenting the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent drawing with Indian ink on positive films, the images of his new series: Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes. Filmed by the artist on June 28, 2024.

On view for the first time at the new Keller Gallery in Besançon, 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).

Documentary film presenting the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent drawing with Indian ink on positive films, the images of his new series: Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes. Filmed by the artist on June 28, 2024.

Documentary film presenting the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent drawing with Indian ink on positive films, the images of his new series: Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes. Filmed by the artist on June 28, 2024.

Documentary film presenting the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent drawing with Indian ink on positive films, the images of his new series: Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes. Filmed by the artist on June 28, 2024.

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...
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).

x 133 photos of the new art prints from the series Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on yellow Wang sketching paper (80g), unique print, format 80 x 60 cm, 2024.

x 266 photos of the new art prints from the series Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on Rives BFK white (250g) & cream (160g) papers, unique print, format 76 x 56 cm, 2024.

x 167 photos of the new art prints from the series Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on white Gmund Hanf hemp paper (120g), unframed format 100 x 70 cm.

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 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...

A series of portrait-photos taken by photographer Lionel Franck Georges, showing the artist working, in his Besançon studio's, on the various stages of the screen-printing process: drawing and peeling out the inactinic films, exposing the screens in the light table and printing the images on different kind of papers... for completing his new series: "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes #2".

Series of one-of-a-kind prints, hand-silk-screened acrylic paint enhanced with Indian ink on yellow Wang Sketching paper (80g), format 80 x 60 cm, on white paper (250g) & Rives BFK cream (160g), format 76 x 56 cm and on a new Gmund Hanf paper, white, hemp (120g), format 100 x 70 cm.

My dear friend Johnes Ruta (curator and art critic) decided to read the text TRANSVERSALITY by my dear friend Marie-Madeleine Varet (philosopher), which he had liked very much, and so here is this beautiful impromptu video:

- An excerpt from the philosopher Marie-Madeleine Varet, French. On the work of the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent : TRANSVERSALITY. It is part of the traversée of contemporary art, a journey, a path: "... there is no end, only the path. But I'd like to be, modestly and on my own scale, like the great jazz drummers: jazz drummers are always just a little ahead of the music playing, and that's what makes the soloists pulsate and throws the musicians they accompany totally forward. When you're slightly ahead of the beat, it's because you're doing your job well." Jean-Claude Guillaumon, "L'art, fabrication ou transgression", 2007.


Series of photos showing the different stages of the screen-printing process: drawing and peeling out the inactinic ruby films, exposing the screens in the light table and printing the images on different kind of papers... for completing his new series: "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes #2".

Series of one-of-a-kind prints, hand-silk-screened acrylic paint enhanced with Indian ink on yellow Wang Sketching paper (80g), format 80 x 60 cm, on white paper (250g) & Rives BFK cream (160g), format 76 x 56 cm and on a new Gmund Hanf paper, white, hemp (120g), format 100 x 70 cm.

In particular, I quote and comment on the following important books, with this quotation by Robert Byron from his book, From Russia to Tibet:

CONFESSION OF A TRAVELLER

"As a member of a community and heir to a culture that are today equally controversial, I wanted to discover ideas - if indeed those of the West were outdated - likely to improve the course of the World and, to this end, also to know, via the language of my own sensibility, the beings and things that constitute THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLD.*"

OTHER BOOKS:
- RIPRAP, GARY SNYDER
- KWAÏDAN, STORIES AND STUDIES OF STRANGE THINGS, LAFCADIO HEARN
- THE SUPERHUMAN LIFE OF GUÉSAR DE LING, THE TIBETAN HERO, ALEXANDRA DAVID-NÉEL
- THE DEATH OF BALZAC, OCTAVE MIRBEAU
- THE KING AND THE CORPSE, HEINRICH ZIMMER
- RELATING, IN DEPTH, IN COINCIDENCE TWO SIMILAR SUBJECTS EVOKED IN FILMED INTERVIEWS: NICKY DE ST PHALLE (ARTIST) -1965- & AURÉLIEN BARROU (ASTROPHYSICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER) > "THE TECHNO-PHALIC VERSUS THE VULVO-ENGLOBING", JUNE 2024, etc...

A few 360° photos extracted from the film shoot in partnership with Agence Vauban of Besançon (Mathieu Allard); camera and images by Mathis Jacquerot, filmed on location on May 29 2024. Discover, as if you were there, the three different rooms of the studio where the artist has been working since 2004, after his return from New York. Of particular interest are the large-scale mural installation of paintings on Plexiglas (3.15 x 6.30 m), the silkscreen equipment, the Mexican sculptures and masks and the two bookshelves, which we hope you'll enjoy discovering... Watch the interactive video on Matterport

Documentary film shot in partnership with Agence Vauban of Besançon (Mathieu Allard); camera and images by Mathis Jacquerot, filmed on location on May 29 2024. Discover, as if you were there, the three different rooms of the studio where the artist has been working since 2004, after his return from New York. Of particular interest are the large-scale mural installation of paintings on Plexiglas (3.15 x 6.30 m), the silkscreen equipment, the Mexican sculptures and masks and the two bookshelves, which we hope you'll enjoy discovering... Watch the interactive video on Matterport

A big thank you to my dear friend Marie-Madeleine Varet, who has followed my work with passion and interest since we met in 2013 and who since then has written about my work in progress with great lightning, deep and curious interest with always her very generous and fraternal thoughts as in a through soul mate relationship. Here, are these 12 small critical texts, which are, for me as an artist, some real gifts, real little jewels, and I hope they can serve as a can-opener and could reveal the deep meanings of my art, so that the public can discover my work in a much more joyful, intimate, global and universal way, than they seem to feel and misunderstand it to this day...

- ABOUT THE FILMED INTERVIEW BETWEEN JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT AND JOHNES RUTA, APRIL 21, 2024
- TEXT FOR "THE FOUR PILLARS OF HEAVEN" EXHIBITION CATALOGUE [2020]
- TEXT ON THE SACRED FOR THE "FOUR PILLARS OF HEAVEN" BROCHURE (2020)
- ABOUT THE "SHAKTI-YONI" SERIES (2018)
- PRESENTATION: EXTRACTS FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS
- THE NOTION OF "INFINITY" IN JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT'S ART WORK
- ABSTRACTION / THEORETICAL MODE / SPIRITUAL MODE: THINKING WHAT WE SEE
- ON THE WORK OF JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT / TRANSVERSALITY
- OF WONDER, OF MOVEMENT, OF TRANS-GRESSION AS PASSAGE, SURPASSING LIMITS
- ABOUT JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT: SOME NOTES (2014)
- MARIE-MADELEINE'S QUESTIONS I COULDN'T OR WOULDN'T ANSWER (MAY 2014)
- ABOUT COMPLEX THINKING IN THE NEW IMAGES ON THE FOLLOWING WEB PAGES (2013)

Interactive 3D documentary film shot in partnership with Agence Vauban de Besançon (Mathieu Allard); camera and shots by Mathis Jacquerot. Discover, as if you were there, the three different rooms of the studio where the artist has been working since 2004, after his return from New York. Of particular interest are the large-scale mural installation of paintings on Plexiglas (3.15 x 6.30 m), the silkscreen equipment, the Mexican sculptures and masks and the two bookshelves, which we hope you'll enjoy discovering... 

JOHNES RUTA: Good morning and good afternoon, it's today April 21st 2024, I'm Johnes Ruta from New Haven, Connecticut, USA. I'm an independent curator, an art theorist and a writer, and I'm here with my long-time dear friend Jean-Pierre Sergent, who I knew from when he lived in Long Island City, in New York, were he stayed until 2003. And I've come here to talk with him and to spend some time and see his work and to learn about what he's working on these days and renew our friendship. So, I would like to ask him some questions about his work and have him, speak, informally as much as possible. So, I have some questions I wanted to ask him about his time in New York, about the years that he spent there. He said from 1993 to 2003. And, how you got there, Jean-Pierre? And about your associations there, with artists and your affinity with the beat generation, with Alexandra David-Néel…

JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT : Oh yes, but she's not part of the beat generation!

JR: Okay, no, but, as a personal mentor… Your inspirations from Allen Ginsberg and his poetry… from, Norman O'Brown's, work Life Against Death, 1959, which was essentially a psychoanalysis of history. And Richard Serra's sculptures and others…. So, please tell me what you like about those things and how you relate to it?

JPS: Well, first of all, Johnes, thank you so much for being here. It's really a great pleasure to welcome you here, in my Besançon studio's... Since we haven't seen each other for more than 20 years. So it's really important for me to exchange with you again. And yesterday, we went to the Courbet Museum and we really had a nice time in the city of Ornans.

JR: Yes, we had a wonderful time!

Interview with my lifelong friend, Johnes Ruta, who came from the USA to visit me and other artist friends in Prague, Vienna and Paris during his trip to Europe in the spring of 2024.
We filmed these interview series on Sunday April 21 2024, and it was very cold in the studio. Johnes, as always, had a lots of interesting questions to ask me....

About Johnes Ruta : "As an arts activist, I consider it my personal mission to develop public understanding of individual creativity, especially toward the appreciation of arts, culture, and the positive evolution of humanity."

Filmed in partnership with Agence Vauban of Besançon, camera: Mathieu Allard & Mathis Jacquerot. Discover as if you were there, the seventy-two paintings on Plexiglas, installed on eight panels, in the magnificent and monumental spaces of the Museum's two staircases. This monumental, eighty-square-meter installation is the largest to date completed by the painter. Exhibited from September 16, 2019 to September 4, 2023.

I glean and collect quotes, aphorisms and little phrases from artists, writers and philosophers that appear on my Twitter Home Page. It's a daily practice when I'm in the studio, in the morning, to look at the news, information and images that I scroll through on this page to take the temperature of the World. It's a bit like what I used to do when I lived in New York, before the advent of computers, buying the big edition of the New York Sunday Times every Sunday and cutting out the images that caught my eye, to screen-print them later on in my paintings. "We must cultivate our garden", said the great Voltaire! So I chose little extracts from texts posted by Internet users, whom I'd like to thank sincerely here; collecting them a bit like someone who lived a long time ago, in a big house with a big garden where I went to pick flowers and vegetables, smell the forest air, listen to the birds singing and feel the presence of wild animals... Please follow the artist's Twitter Home Page.

These new Notes from 2023, like the previous ones, are still written under the aegis of Lucretius's beautiful phrase from his book On Nature: "Like a man, in the midst of a dream, devoured by thirst, and who seeks to drink, and cannot find the water that might quench the fire in his bones...". For I have had a total and unquenchable thirst for Culture, Art, Meaning and Beauty ever since I was a child. In fact, I can still remember, as a child, sitting at a table with the whole family in my great-grandfather Werner's big, beautiful house, making googly eyes at me as I asked his very kind and loving 'maid' Fortunata for a second cream cone, even though I hadn't finished the one I was eating: "Jean-Pierre, your eyes are bigger than your stomach!" Today, I still haven't forgotten that phrase, because it defines me perfectly well and more than any other. But perhaps artists and shamans are exempt, thanks to their ogresco appetite and demiurge-like natures, from this formula of regulating popular wisdom and appetite...

The artist and the anthropologist exchange and discuss on Art, Art History, Contemporary Art, shamanism, violence, sexuality and the various ethnographic influences that deeply inspire the artist's work. Filmed at the Besançon studio on September 1 and 15, 2023, Lionel Georges cameras.

Jean-Pierre Sergent: I would just just like to quote this small extract as an exergue found in a book I'm actually reading, to start our conversation with. It's a book by Robert Byron, titled:
THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLD: FROM RUSSIA TO TIBET, A TRAVELER'S CONFESSION (1930)
"As a member of a community and heir to a culture that are today equally controversial, I wanted to discover ideas - if indeed those of the West were outdated - likely to improve the course of the World and, to this end, also to know, via the language of my own sensibility, the beings and things that constitute THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLD." So there it is, our conversation is off to a good start. And our first idea was to talk about shamanism. Noël, would you like to say a few words about it?

After 4 years of exhibiting his paintings at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon, Franco-New York artist Jean-Pierre Sergent will close this poetic chapter on Sunday, September 3, 2023. So there's little time left for those who haven't yet discovered this artistic universe... 
Article by Eva Bourgin for MaCommune.Info, August 30, 2023.

In partnership with Agence Vauban Besançon, camera: Mathieu Allard & Mathis Jacquerot. Discover as if you were there, the seventy-two paintings on Plexiglas, installed on eight panels, in the magnificent and monumental spaces of the Museum's two staircases. This monumental, eighty-square-meter installation is the largest to date by the Franco-New York painter. On view from September 16, 2019 to September 4, 2023.

Filmed at Claudie Floutier studio-apartment's on June 9, 2023. Cameras: Lionel Georges. Thanks to Millie Floutier & Guillaume Chilemme for helping with transcriptions and Christine Dubois for proofreading.

 PART 1/4: Jean-Pierre Sergent: Hello, everybody, today is June 9, 2023, and I have the great good fortune and honor of interviewing my friend Claudie Floutier, who is an artist and was also my teacher at the Besançon School of Fine Arts. We're here in her studio-apartment, and we're going to show some of the work you've done throughout your career. So, to begin with, you often talk about your childhood with your grandfather. It was in Provence. And you lived a bit like a wild woman, a tomboy, a bit in the wild, picking aromatic and medicinal herbs with him.

Claudie Floutier: With my grandfather!

JPS: Yes, well, if you'd like please, to tell us about your childhood...