Reviews 2020-Present

JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT INAUGURATES THE NEW GALLERY KELLER IN BESANÇON | BVV MAGAZINE #457 | FRANCE, P. 37 (read the article online)

From mid-December to March 22, the new Galerie Keller at 7 rue Proudhon presents Jean-Pierre Sergent's exhibition "Erotica / Works on Paper". This first show features eight previously unseen works - chosen from a total of 566 - from his recent Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes series, produced in 2024. Silkscreened on paper, they combine acrylic and Indian ink highlights. Also on view are small-format works from the Shakti-Yoni series and a large-scale painting on Plexiglas from his Mayan Diary series. With this exhibition, gallery owner Heidi Suter, with forty years' experience in Zurich, marks her new coming in Besançon City. An unmissable opportunity to explore the world of the Franco-New York artist. The Gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday and by appointment.

BROADCAST ON FRANCE 3 TV FRANCHE-COMTÉ ON THE EXHIBITION “EROTICA, WORKS ON PAPER”, BY LAURENT DUCROZET, KELLER GALLERY, BESANÇON, MARCH 4, 2025 (watch the video)

Journalist France 3 speaker: We're going to talk about culture now, with these original works, currently on view in a new art gallery that has just opened its doors in the Besançon City Center. The first exhibition, entitled “Erotica, Works on Papers”, is devoted to the work of Franco-New-York artist Jean-Pierre Sergent. Laurent Ducrozet and Jean-Stéphane Maurice take us into his world. Just have a look!

Laurent Ducrozet: There are always a few doors to push to enter an artist's world. Behind the door of this gallery-apartment is the work of Jean-Pierre Sergent. With some American and Besançon period. The corridor is narrow, but enough to understand how this prolific artist works. His screen-printed work is built up from successive layers.

Jean-Pierre Sergent: I continue to work like this, precisely with the superimposition of images, to blur the lines and create a kind of confusion. I believe that beauty is born of confusion, because when you encounter something beautiful, you're overwhelmed and destabilized. So I want my work to destabilize the viewer. 

LD: In the gallery's main room, there are only eight paintings, but the series produced last year includes over 560. A selection titled “Erotica”.For the artist has always questioned sex in all its dimensions.

JPS: It's a reflection on society. Because the porn business is just as big as the arms business.When you're a human being, you really have to ask yourself this question. Is it slavery, of course. But I think that sometimes, in one of these images, there's a state of grace that comes from it, a state of ecstasy. And I choose that image and transpose it into my work by means of silkscreen. he talks with his friend Heidi Suter about the next upcoming group show.

LD: Jean-Pierre Sergent is the first artist to exhibit in this intimate space, created by his friend Heidi Suter, who already runs a gallery in Zurich. A new gallery that will of course, host some other exhibitions this year.

BESANÇON: THE NEW KELLER GALLERY WELCOMES ARTIST JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT | HEBDO25 | MARTIN SAUSSARD | February 8, 2025 (read article online)

Franch-American Artist Jean-Pierre Sergent has teamed up with his long time friend Heidi Suter, a gallery owner from Zurich, to open the Keller gallery at 7, rue Proudhon, in Besançon City, France. A first exhibition, “"EROTICA / WORKS ON PAPER"”, featuring several of his Summer 2024 creations, is on view until March 22.

Jean-Pierre Sergent is exhibiting at the Keller gallery, run by Heidi Suter, until March 22. Launched in December 2024, this exhibition presents eight works from the new artprints series “Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes”, created by Jean-Pierre Sergent in the summer of 2024. Through his work, the artist seeks to reveal the spiritual dimension of eroticism, through serigraphs constructed from patterns inspired by his artistic research. “Sexuality is at the root of everything. It's important for me to show it through spirituality. People often dissociate the two. In India, for example, the awakening of the senses includes these themes and practices.

Born in Morteau, the former Beaux-Arts student from Besançon traveled extensively, first to Canada, then for ten years to New York, where he enjoyed the finest hours of his career. “Over there, the public has a real artistic curiosity,” says Jean-Pierre Sergent. Back in the region since 2004, he has set up his studio near the Gare d'Eau area and continues to exhibit, as in Lugano with his friend Heidi Suter, in Cyprus and for four years at the Besançon Fines-arts Museum with his monumental mural exhibition “4 Pillars Of The Sky” (1999-2023). On Rue Proudhon, in Heidi Suter's apartment-gallery, the artist shares his work and energy, while giving freedom to the public for their own interpretation of his works. After thie exhibition, other local artists are expected to take over the premises for a new group show end of March.

RADIO INTERVIEW WITH THIERRY EME "LES GENS D'ICI" FOR FRANCE BLEU BESANÇON | JANUARY 10, 2025 [listen to the interview in French]

- "Les Gens d'Ici" is the name of Thierry Eme's new morning radio broadcast, on which he meets the people living in Franche-Comté. And this morning, Thierry, did you put some Art on your meeting network?

- Thierry Eme: Among the locals, we've got a visual artist from Bisontin who has exhibited in Europe, the United States, China and Iran, and who's currently showing his work in Besançon. You shouldn't miss him, because he's also exhibiting in a new gallery, the Glerie Keller. Hello Jean-Pierre Sergent!

- Jean-Pierre Sergent: Hello Thierry, and hello to all our listeners. It's a real pleasure to be with you.

- TE: What's this gallery? Is it a branch of a Zurich gallery?

- JPS: No, not at all. My friend Heidi Suter couldn't find space in Zurich, because rents were getting too expensive. And so she decided to move here, to Besançon, to open this new exhibition space, because we've known each other for over ten years already, yes, we've been working together for ten years. We did the Lugano fairs together (Wopart), we're partners and for our first show, we decided to open with this exhibition “Erotica, works on paper” in this space and the exhibition will last three months, the time it takes to wipe the slate clean, if you like, so that people get to know and discover the gallery.

- TE: Jean-Pierre, you're better known internationally than you are here locally. Is Jean-Pierre Sergent a household name in the art world today?

- JPS.: Yes, it's true that I'm known because I do a lot of work in the studio, and on social networks too, of course.

- TE: So, what is this work? What would be the dominant if there was one. Are we talking cosmogony, things like that? Could you please enlighten us a little?

- JPS: Yes, it's a new series called “Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes”. So karma is all the things that happen to us in life, and Kali is an Indian goddess of life, death and sexuality. So there's a lot of erotic imagery in my work, but also a lot of the spiritual dimension that I represent through patterns or emptiness. Here, we see a painting on our left representing the Void, the cosmic state of the Hindus, pure consciousness, the meta-cosmic void. Next to it is a Plexiglas with the same theme.

- TE: We're talking about patterns. What are patterns? They're repetitive figures, right in principle?

- JPS: Yes, a pattern is a geometric figure in which the motif is repeated. And there's a very fine book on patterns called Patterns That Connect: Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art by Carl Schuster, who is an ethnologist who studied all the primitive tribes (in quotes). He pondered the meaning of all these designs. Why did the patterns repeat themselves and what did they show or represent? And often, it represented genetic interconnections. And so, this is father, mother, daughter, son. The most convincing example of this are the Asmats totems of New Guinea. They're poles like this, three or four meters high, so you can see the successive generations, and the patterns generally have a meaning that we've lost. We see it as a decorative work, but for them, it had a deep, human, spiritual and intergenerational meaning.

- TE: Eight new works on paper, it's mainly acrylic paint, right, that's silkscreened?

- JPS: Yes, absolutely. Now I've found a new way of working. I always apply Indian ink before or after printing the images, and it overlaps. For me, it's important to work a little in confusion, like that, because I think that a single image doesn't describe the diversity of Life. So here we have several layers printed successively, several layers that interpenetrate each other.

- TE: In resonance, in interaction?

- JPS: And above all in a mixture with many different Cultures, because I don't like to live in just one Culture.

- TE: So, you're exhibited in quite a few places around the world. Was this something you would have imagined one day when you were younger?

- JPS: No, absolutely not. You know, I had a farm in Charquemont where I had seventeen horses, and I found a gallery in Canada that wanted to work with me in Toronto. And they said to me: but you have to come and live in Canada! I said: wait a minute, I've got seventeen horses, it's going to be a big move! And that's how it turned out. I took my two or three backpacks, moved to Montreal and from Montreal went to New York, where I stayed for ten years. And that's really where I learned the real business of being an artist.

- TE: Through contact with people, with artists there, with visual artists?

- JPS: Yes, absolutely. There's a dynamic, a level of energy in New York that you can't find anywhere else.

- TE: Those were the years of Charlélie Couture? Was he there too?

- JPS: Yes, I met him once on the street. Yes, but he had a much more money than I did in fact, because he had a big annual budget. In New York, it's hard, but these are years that count double or triple or quadruple, because you meet so many passionate people, big names, very interesting people, and you manage to get by as an artist. That's where I really learned about being an real artist!

- JPS: Absolutely. But it all started when I was a child. Because when I was a child, I suffered from severe asthma attacks, so I couldn't move. I was at home and I had the big book of animals where I copied carbon images like this and I made paintings like this, little paintings on plywood and today I still do, in a way, the same thing. If you like, I copy images and silkscreen them, which is more practical because I can print them in any color. And that's how it developed. Because what's important for us, human beings, is to show the diversity of Life and the beauty somewhere, it's so important the beauty and then the unexpected and the awakening. You have to have an awakening level of consciousness. I believe that Art serves to awaken consciousness.
It's a way of sublimating things, acts, places and cultures too, and then saying, here it is, it exists, I'm giving it to you in a way. Think about it, it's a bit like that. Yes, it's a gift. Art is a gift! Absolutely, yes, it really is a gift, an absolute gift. And I'm very proud and honored to be an artist. Because, all around me, I see my friends getting on in years, and they're complaining a bit about their life, because it's not essentially rewarding anywhere. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not valued financially, because it's always very hard financially to be an artist. But I'm really happy to be living this incredible life, and I'm always working hard.

- TE : There's some very sexy stuff I've seen here, it's really hot!

- JPS: Yes, it is. But I work on sexuality a bit like one would work on a tantric practice, if you like. Systematically, I use erotic images, perhaps to break away from primary eroticism and enter into something else, to transcend a certain bodily reality.

- TE: Okay, do you have anything else to say?

- JPS: No, but we can go and see Hedi, the Director, if you want to talk to her?

- TE: Yes, let's do that.

- JPS: I'll also show you my Plexiglas painting. There, you can see the beautiful Plexiglas!

- TE: Ah yes, indeed.

- JPS: So this painting is: 1.40 by 1.40 meter.

- TE: You immediately think of a Jewish star? I don't know why...

- JPS: But no, not at all! In fact, it's a Hindu yantra, it's more or less the same thing, but here, the triangles interpenetrate like this... There are male and female triangles, and in the middle there's the Bindu point. It's like a cosmic big bang, yes, absolutely.

- TE : And still with this frame, we can clearly recognize your style and your Art with the colors, the very strong flat tints!

- JPS: Yes, but I always surround the painted Plexiglas. So this, the center, is hand-painted, it's not an industrial product. The colored Plexiglas is industrial, so it's a bit of a confrontation between an industrial product and the intimate, the secret, and it creates a dynamic, like a roundabout dynamic, like obvious signage.

- TE: It's the setting, in fact?

- JPS: Yes, it's the frame, but it's stronger than the frame. It defines a sacred space, and this pictorial world can be called the center of the world (axis mundi).

- TE: What's your role, Heidi? So tell me, what's your function?
Heidi Suter: I'm the gallery owner, the organizer!

- JPS: Yes, but Heidi has put all her money into this project. And so, yes, we're doing this exhibition for three months, as I said earlier, to wipe the slate clean... And then afterwards, we'll be showing artists from Besançon, friends of mine, including Guimbarde, who unfortunately passed away recently, as well as a few other friends. And then after that, she'll show painters from Zurich. We'll see how it goes. We mustn't prejudge anything. But the space is, in fact, magnificent.

"JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT EXHIBITS AT THE NEW GALERIE KELLER" | L'EST REPUBLICAIN OF BESANÇON | CATHERINE CHAILLET | JANUARY 15TH 2025

They have been working together for 10 years: he, the painter from Besançon and New York, and Heidi Suter, a gallery owner from Zurich. Together they opened Galerie Keller at 7, rue Proudhon in Besançon. Until March, Jean-Pierre Sergent presents  "Erotica. Works on paper".
 

                               Jean-Pierre Sergent exhibits at Galerie Keller, run by Zurich-based Heidi Suter. Photo Arnaud Castagné.

Of the 566 works on paper in his "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes" series,

Jean-Pierre Sergent has chosen to exhibit a selection of eight works on paper, created between Summer and Autumn 2024. The painter pursues his path, off the beaten track, nourished by primitive cultures. "Artists are the memory of the world and ancients cultures. Without being Christ-like, I show what exists and what is going to get lost." This quest began during a lucky trip to Egypt with his grandfather. Jean-Pierre Sergent, a student at the Beaux-Arts in Besançon at the time, never resumed the tranquil course of his studies: “During that trip, I grasped a spiritual dimension that I hadn't suspected and that I didn't find again in France. I left the path, as one leaves one's body". He went on to travel: New York for ten years, Mexico, shamanic trances and, he says, now that his journeys are no more than books, the energy they brought with them.

Intimacy on paper

Energy is on display in these eight small-format works on paper, an intimate vision of a much broader proposal, and a large-format work on Plexiglas, his preferred medium, in the last room of the small gallery, which blends cosmos and tangled triangles of masculine and feminine forms. "Nothing obliges us to remain artists, it's a privilege I'm aware of, but I believe we're in a period of rupture, in a post-cultural society, where what used to be important is no longer so. We no longer dream of being Matisse or Picasso, but of being a comic or a footballer. Culture takes time, and people don't have it any any more," think to himself Jean-Pierre Sergent, whose work is struggling to find an echo, even though his four-year "Les quatre piliers du ciel" (The Four Pillars of Heaven), 72 colorful and symbolic panels, were hung at the Musée des Beaux-Arts (1999-2023). He enjoyed the institutional recognition, but admits to disappointment at "the indifference of the public; I didn't get a phone call during this exhibition". The painter continues his work, "because it's life, because I'm alive!", and is therefore offering further opportunities for encounters until March. After him, Heidi Suter, who ran two successive galleries in Zurich for almost forty years, will open the doors of the Keller gallery to other artists from Besançon.

THE ORANGERY GALLERY OF SAUVIGNEY-LÈS-GRAY ORGANIZES AN EXHIBITION DEDICATED TO JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT, ENTITLED "Polyphonies: Arts, cultures and civilizations", until June 6th. « POLYPHONIES : ARTS, CULTURES ET CIVILIZATIONS », UNTIL JUNE 6TH, By DOMINIQUE BOLOPION

Est Républicain Newspaper, Haute-Saône, May 5 2022

Coming to see an exhibition at the Orangery of Sauvigney-lès-Gray is an experience that invites you to take time, the time taken to go to a place that is worth the detour, but also to contemplate contemporary works.
Until June 6, the place welcomes paintings by Jean-Pierre Sergent. Originally from the region where he studied Fine Arts after a school of architecture in Strasbourg, he flew to Montreal and then New York to develop his imagination on canvas for ten years.
Back in Besançon, he exhibited his work around the world. His exhibition at the Orangerie is a good complement to his presence since 2019 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Besançon with a fresco of 72 paintings in Plexiglas.
At the Orangery, about twenty paintings are put forward, originating from different series that have in common to show under a new look different civilizations, cultures and spiritualities. India, Mexico, the Mayan world, the configurations are multiple but always with a common thread "a spirituality that connects to the earth.
There is a dimension of cosmic sacredness in his approach, filled with multiple references that appear by scrutinizing the slightest detail of a work. The line is precise, the depth of color as well. "What interests me is to show joy, the diversity of the world and also of cultures that are disappearing even if we don't talk about them. Art heals and creation provides energy," says the artist.
Jean-Pierre Sergent exhibition at the Orangery gallery in Sauvigney-lès-Gray at 32 Grande rue. Opening hours: Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 7 pm, during the week by appointment. Conference on Sunday, May 15 at 4:30 pm (reservation required). Meeting with the artist on Saturday May 28 at 3 pm.

JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT: ARTIST OF THE ECSTATIC SOUL, BY AVA BARIA & SOONI GANDER FOR HAPPY ALI MAGAZINE, HONG KONG, APRIL 20 2022

Jean-Pierre Sergent is a French-New Yorker artist, who currently lives and works in Besançon, France. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s: in the US, Europe, Iran, and China. In 2019, a monumental fresco of 72 paintings on Plexiglas, of 80 square metres, The Four Pillars of Heaven, was installed at the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology of Besançon where it remains.
Jean-Pierre Sergent

Presented to the public, during this particular exhibition is a selection of 20 small formats from the series Shakti-Yoni: Ecstatic Cosmic Dances from 2016 to 2020, 25 x 25 cm; four works on paper from the series: Beauty Is Energy, 2003 and Sky Umbilicus, 2006, 76 x 56 cm; as well as a large painting on Plexiglas Ladies Of The Ants, 1.40 x 1.40 m, 2015, from the series Mayan Diary.

Since the works Sergent made in New York after his Mexican travels, and especially after the 11/11 attacks, there is an energy and what the artist describes as “An aesthetic, karmic, sexual violence… that is present, and that springs from the depth, from archaic and distant times: powerful, true, indispensable, wild, consubstantial and fusional of life.

“The arts and rituals of the ancient civilizations seem to him much more adapted, more complete, concrete and just, in front of and towards the complex realities of our cosmic self and of our human, individual and collective destinies: birth-death of every human being and of every civilization, sexuality being obviously the link and the starting point of all this. And violence, too, because life always feeds on life, even when fully vegetarian, it can only be so.” 

For years, while whole immersed in the New York melting pot, Sergent began experimenting with media and images that shocked and drew in his audience. In his silkscreen work, he combined the image of a statue of a sacrificial Aztec priest-chamber, The Flayed, with the ritual, hieratic drawing, on a small piece of wood, of a Selknam Indian from Tierra del Fuego, a tribe that has now completely disappeared.

An Egyptian Apis bull carrying on its back the mummy of the dead (the body and the soul, the Ka: the constituent element of the person representing his or her life force, in Egyptian mythology) in the other world, just above a Gaia-Nut with the body of a woman illustrated by a contemporary pornographic image. Gaia is of course, that fundamental Greek deity (the Earth) who gave birth to the first divine beings and Nout, the Egyptian goddess of the sky, who symbolizes the firmament and is considered the mother of all stars.

Sergent says, “All Art and all creation are at the same time a choice or a non-choice. And for my part, I assume this choice to open my work to the world, to its diversities, its strangenesses, sometimes disturbing some.

EXHIBITION JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT, POLYPHONIES : ARTS, CULTURES & CIVILISATIONS BY JEAN-PAUL GAVARD-PERRET, 15 APRIL 2022 for LE LITTÉRAIRE

FROM PAST TO FUTURE

Taking as a sort of incipit to his exhibition the sentence of Hermann Hesse: "When you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What is not part of ourselves does not bother us", Jean-Pierre Sergent creates since his works made in New York, after his Mexican trips and the attack of September 11, 2001, an energy and he adds "an aesthetic, karmic, sexual violence".
Everything seems to resurface from the depths, from archaic times, wild in fusion with existence.

Faced with and towards the complex realities of a cosmic self and human destinies, he brings back to the day arts and rituals of ancient civilizations where sexuality was the link and the starting point.
The artist has thus blended several images from the depths of time to create a new wedding of diversified rituals and to open up the world in peril and at a time when he says "beauty alone, is no longer a sufficient excuse for artistic creation."

More is needed and such creation proves it.

JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT INTERVIEWED FOR LUXURY SPLASH OF ART - January/February Issue 4, BY AGNIESZKA KOWALCZEWSKA | Download the PDF
Art, like sex, has to do with the transcendences of reality, colours, pleasure and death...

Jean-Pierre Sergent – French artist, born in the small town of Morteau (1958) in the northeast of France. Studied architecture in Strasbourg and painting at l’école des Beaux-Arts in Besançon (1978-1981). Jean-Pierre settled in Montreal (1991-1992) where he developed his repertory of artistic form and had successively three studios in New York in Brooklyn, Chelsea and Queens (1993-2003), then he returned home to his native France again (2004) in the City of Besançon where he is living and working now.  He has exhibited in France, Canada, the US, Switzerland, England, Austria and China.

He tells Luxury Splash of Art that ‘Firstly, you need to learn a lot of things, to read a lot of books, to see a lot of movies, to visit a lot of museums, to live a lot of life experiences, to visit a lot of countries, to have a lot of sex, to paint a lot of paintings… before you can even know really what you want and can do. What will be your personal artistic path?’

Luxury Splash of Art: Jean-Pierre it is the greatest pleasure to talk to you, thank you for your time to share your artistic life story with us.    Today, I would like to talk to you about your artwork, your projects, inspiration, spirituality and your current exhibition 4 Pillars of the Sky at the Besançon Fine Arts & Archeology Museum but before we get to these questions, can you please tell us more about yourself. When your journey with art started? What is it in art that makes you so passionate about it?  

JPS: Hello dear Agnieszka and Luxury Splash of Art readers, thanks for your interest in my art and for your questions. Being a visual artist is to embrace the oldest profession in the world, with all due respect to prostitutes, that we commonly say they have been doing their work since the beginning of time. In any case, when we think about the first traces of humanity, beyond all the skeletons and genetic material found by archaeologists like skeletons and cave settlements, artists have been able to be traced back to the first milestones of human thoughts and beliefs. So, artist, as a profession, a specification, is without a doubt significantly older than priesthood, architects, warriors, farmers, politicians, insurers or even bankers! And it is like belonging to a long lineage, a large family or some kind of “old souls club”. Picasso once said in an interview with the famous French writer and Minister of Culture André Malraux in Le Miroir des limbes: “Do you know what I think sometimes? It amuses me: I’m superstitious. I think it’s always the same Little Man, from the stone ages. He comes back, like the wandering Jew. Painters inevitably reincarnate as painters; it’s a breed, like cats.”

So, being an artist is being part of an everlasting community and at the same time having a need to be outside, on the fringe of main societies in which we are living, in order to better understand the whole picture. There is also a point of being some kind of healer, as well, because Art is always deeply connected to Death, Art is always engraved in its essence, the pilgrim of Death and the remembrance of the dead, truly more deeply than Love, I believe. As Henry Miller said in Remember to Remember: “The human mission on earth is to remember.” Without artwork, we will have no ideas in a manner of speaking about all the existences of all historical Gods and Goddesses, all rituals that the pictures and statues accompanied and depicted and made possible; it would be a disenchanted and memoryless World. Somehow Art is the incarnation of the living into its present, its movement and its realization. Not only has it nourished the personal and collective unconscious, but it is and has been a support for all “spiritual” practices starting a long time ago and continuing in the present.

As for what is Art for me: in a few words, I have been making it since I was a child and have continued to make it in an uninterrupted process to the present. As a child, I suffered from a terrible asthma attack, so painting images of animals and landscapes gave me a marvellous way to escape my suffering and the strong anxieties of being afraid of dying by suffocation. It is also this important dimension that I would like to evoke here, which is the strong healing power of Art, for oneself and for others. I believe that art can be experienced as a revelation, that’s what happened to me during various trips to Egypt (into the tomb of Queen Nefertari in Luxor), and in Mexico, while visiting the sacred pyramids like Chichén Itzá or Uxmal. In a certain way, one needs to experience Art with their full-body, not only with their mind, their knowledge or with image reproductions. It’s at the same time a physical (sensual) and spiritual experience. Art helps one to feel the constant flux of life energies, as blood, as rivers, as stars… It’s part of belonging to the Universe and being connected somehow. At some point, it’s also a language that needs to be learned, to be initiated into. Coming back to Picasso saying: “When people want to understand Chinese, they think: I have to learn Chinese, don’t they? Why they never think they have to learn painting?“

LSA: Once you said that you are ‘Making art alive in a society which is spiritually dead.’ can you please tell me more about this? Should art touch soul, or should it sell? Perhaps both? What is your view?

JPS: Yes, exactly, I always enjoy rereading this sentence, because to tell you the truth, if you profoundly open your eyes and seek reality, we are currently facing a deep, profound and desperate situation, almost an apocalyptic one. I will spare you the list of bad news for your own good. But what strikes me most emotionally is really to have the feeling of the disappearance of spirituality or of spiritualities, leading de facto to the disappearance of the soul. A few months ago, I wrote a small text about that matter: About the disappearance of the soul today

After having read Maurice Maeterlinck’s nice book ‘The Treasure of the Humble’ where he states: “There really are centuries when the soul goes back to sleep and no one cares about it anymore.” and even General De Gaule when interviewed in the same Malraux book, said roughly the same thing: “And if our civilization is certainly not the first one to deny the immortality of the soul, it is the first for which the soul has absolutely no importance.”

Those sentences are deeply moving for me and as an artist, I can’t imagine living in a world totally secularised and deprived of any spirituality. In a matter of fact, my artistic practice allows me to exhibit my works in galleries, Art Fairs and Museums and I always have the feeling that the audience as a whole or even curators or art critics, in particular, don’t have any clue, any access to the strong and powerful spiritual meaning, presence and statements of my paintings. But again, to quote Malraux’s book: “The time of art does not coincide with that of the living.” So, I have to deal with that. It’s been somewhat of a constant challenge for all important artists throughout time. Especially, even more, today, since Art, by and throughout the Art Market, the Art business, has really become an industrialized and economically luxurious good, that only really highly rich people can afford to buy and exhibit. It is a new situation that somehow nobody had thought of before. Art being stolen by the rich and powerful, somehow, it’s happened before with the religions and the political powers, but at that time Art was supposed to educate the masses or nonbelievers, it could always be seen by everybody in churches, temples or public buildings; which is no longer the case nowadays where most of the art pieces bought in the auctions houses are ending up locked down in private and secure safes. Also, for example, when you are checking the Artprice list, you can see that art is selling for millions of dollars, but the really dark side or downside of that is that nobody is looking at the artwork of artists who don’t sell at that high price range level (under $100,000 US, you are a nobody, a poor John Doe), those kinds of artists can’t exist and survive anymore somehow. 

LSA: Thank you so much for sharing your view, it is very interesting what you say. Spirituality is very important to you is that the message you want to deliver through your art? What would you like others to see in your work?

JPS: Well, Art cannot just only be a conveyor of a message, an aesthetic, political, environmental, ideological or even spiritual one, but most precisely and truthfully a conveyor of pure energy. It’s something that should hit you in the gut, genitals, eyes, and emotions. It’s a power, like a nuclear battery, a storm, a vortex, a woman’s pussy, a flux, like a parade, a carnival, a skeletons procession (not like the funny Halloween parade on 6th Avenue in NY) and also, simultaneously a swirling butterfly in a ray of sunshine in the soft light of Spring finally returned!

More seriously, I want my art to testify, to be the witness, the landmark, the emblem of the presence of any disappearing myriad of primitive societies and traditional cultures that at some point in time, some time periods, were alive and flourished all around the world. As stated recently on a radio interview the great street life photographer Sabine Weiss: “Everything changes! But it’s good to have been a photographer to witness many beautiful things that will disappear.”

So, I do have a strong and passionate curiosity towards those different cultures, different thinking, different lovemaking, sexual approaches or ritual practices in order to honour the dead, to regenerate and to and revitalize Life, our life, somehow, somewhere, because nothing is granted for free in this world. This could be philosophical, like Buddhism, or Hinduism; or aesthetical, like almost every pre-Colombian artwork like that of Mayan Queen Lady Xoc performing a blood sacrifice passing a rope through a hole in her tongue in order to fall in a trance and be met by the Cosmic Vision Serpent Quetzalcoatl. Sometimes I do also use Japanese bondage images in order to show how an enchained body can access sexual ecstasy by switching anxiety into climax. Art, like sex, has to do with the transcendences of reality, colours, pleasure and death.

LSA: Some artists say that art and creation is like meditation, it allows one to feel connected with inner self and universe. What do you think?  

JPS: Yes, that’s absolutely true. It is a long and fastidious working process, all along, an artist needs to be fully focused and present. You need to pay attention to what you are doing at every step, at every moment of this process and if you are not present, you will miss it. Of course, it’s like any mainstream common spiritual teaching from every part of the World: If I am present, God (whoever or whatever it is) should be present too. As said in the Indian Veda:

“I have embraced all beings,

in order to see the taut thread of the sacred,

where the gods, having attained immortality,

have gone to their common abode.” In JPS Notes Besançon – 2005-présent

LSA: Where do you take the inspiration from for your projects and how long it takes from the moment the process of creation starts in your head to the moment it is ready. Do you allow yourself to be led by intuition or rather to have every step planned?

JPS: At first, I collect, gather, and glean images. Images depicting ancient rituals from different societies, as I said earlier. While in NY, I used to take many photos in Museums, but now I get them mostly from the web and mainly erotic ones. It is a fact that about 50% of images circulating on the Web are pornographic ones, and it seems to me that some of them, a few rare ones, possess a kind of mystical ecstatic aura. That’s what has caught my interest in every art piece throughout all Art History: its aura, its presence. One can see it in Vermeer’s, Giotto’s, Pollock’s, Rothko’s works, some cave paintings, graffiti pieces or many Mughal Indian paintings, and also of course among the so-named “primitive” artworks etc. So, in choosing a simple popular common image (like the Pop artists in NY in the ’60s have done), not of great importance or meaning; I am transforming it into some kind of an iconic image. It’s of course done throughout the lengthy process of selecting the image, the lengthy process of redesigning it on my computer and selecting it according to the statement I want to make at the time when I finally silkscreen this image on my printing table. Of course, the silkscreening process also requires a lot of preparation, when I am printing out the images and especially when I choose the colour. Throughout this process, I am using my intuition and my spiritual connection with art in general, the sun, the water, my ancestors, the bees, the ground (the soil) or any of my sexual desires…

LSA: In your artwork you use different methods and mediums; you create large installation, paint, sculpt, sketch, you do the scenography… What is your favourite method of expressing yourself and why? Is the process of creating your art challenging, if so – in what way?

JPS: Yes, I like to do a lot of those things passionately and all the ways of expressing myself are important in the present and more a posteriori, as life is always changing and something you were able to do a few years ago, you aren’t able to do now, due to a lack of money or other studio problems etc. That’s why I also like writing texts which don’t cost anything (mostly throughout some years of poverty, as I don’t always have enough money to buy art supplies!) Writing is also important for me, not to justify myself, nor to explain the work, but in order to say a similar thing in a different way. We all know that to access the knowledge and memory centre in our brains, every channel is legitimate. A few years ago, I also started filming video interviews with friends in my studio. I do believe it’s a great change in live today with the new technological possibilities which allow us to use all of those different mediums that can easily be shared on the web. I am not quite sure if it does have the same impact as the physical experience that one can have in front a painting, but at least it could open the doors for new people to get a glance at my art.

LSA: I would like to ask you about your 4 Pillars of the Sky exhibition in Besancon museum. This exhibition is your latest project bringing eight large installations together. Can you please tell me more about these art pieces? What inspired you to create them, how they were created and is there any message to the world behind your artwork?

JPS: Yes, since September 2019, 72 square Plexiglas paintings, each measuring 1.05 x 1.05 m, have been installed on eight panels surrounding the four corners of the Museum’s two huge main staircases. This monumental installation, 4 Pillars of the Sky measuring eighty square metres in size is to this day the largest I have realised. These exhibitions were proposed by the Museum Director, M. Nicolas Surlapierre, who had this great idea to hang up this huge selection of paintings amongst this beautiful historic architecture, with origins dating back to 1694 and is the oldest French public collection.

It has a been a really challenging project as technicians worked for more than a month in order to affix the wood panels to the old stone walls which are very high. The assistants and I had to work high up on the scaffoldings at a height of more than 5 m. It is a great honour and privilege to have my works shown in this beautiful space where all the paintings assembled and connected together are really amazing and could hopefully bring the viewer into a state, an experience of joy, of elevation aesthetically or even mystically. The show will probably run for a few years and a catalogue has been published. I gave a conference at the Museum and we filmed three interviews with art professionals/friends that you can see on my video webpage. Here is an extract from the press release:

I want my paintings and art to be: a wall-art (even armour if you will! I don’t care!), an art-architecture (like Indian tipis), an animal-art (like Lascaux), an art-tree, a river-art, a void-art (like for Zen Buddhist monks), a nature-art, a sex-art, an art-dead (like Egyptian tombs), an art-pleasure (Dionysian), an art-presence, an art-soul, an art-joy (like in Jean Giono’s books), an art-body (like in sexuality) etc. So, there is not really a singular and simple message there, as my art is highly complex and it’s more a conglomerate, an aggregation of images, a multitude of visual information, of stimulus impulses like the deployment, the blooming, the sprouting out, the ejaculation of an entire life, colourful, multicultural and sexual!

LSA: Is there any message you would like to share with Luxury Splash of Art readers?  

JPS: Firstly, thank you very much for having read this article to the end, I hope you found it interesting and enriching. Secondly, I would like to quote the German painter Emil Nolde: “I obeyed an irresistible need to represent a deep spirituality.” Which profoundly shows us how the spiritual meaning, the spiritual seeking and the spiritual quests are important, even essentials for some artists, not for all of them! Paradoxically enough, it is something that seems totally absent from the art scene production nowadays. For we live today in a society mainly and solely based on money, which is the only supreme value worshipped as the biblical golden calf, and this de-spiritualization is, therefore, more than normal, for money, of course, has no intrinsic spiritual value (in and of itself!)

LSA: Do you have any advice for starting artists?

JPS: Yes absolutely, Art is not an easy business, and time, is at the same time our friend and our enemy, as one can’t really be a fully grown artist before the age of maturity, excepted for a few rare exceptions; all artists have done their important works during their years of maturity. So, you need to be enormously curious and profoundly patient. I just read an article on Twitter this morning about the famous Swiss writer-traveller Ella Maillart saying: “I had a sleeping bag, two weeks’ worth of food on my back and I thought, I must go and see the beauty of the world while waiting to find out why I am alive.” It is a fact, a reality: firstly, you need to learn a lot of things, to read a lot of books, to see a lot of movies, to visit a lot of museums, to live a lot of life experiences, to visit a lot of countries, to have a lot of sex, to paint a lot of paintings… before you can even know really what you want and can do. What will be your personal artistic path? Getting back to Picasso, he once said: “You copy, you copy, and then one day you are missing a copy and then, you make an original painting.”

LSA: It was a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time. All the best to you and your future projects. Where can we find you work, please share link to your website and social media.  

JPS: Yes, it has been a great pleasure to write this article, thank you so much for your interesting questions, dear Agnieszka. My work can be seen at the Museum in my hometown Besançon (when it reopens), in my Studio and at the Keller Galerie in Zürich, Switzerland. Your readers can also follow me on various social media, and I will be more than happy to follow-up on this discussion with them. I am wishing you all a safe and joyous day and a safe journey during these difficult and challenging times, best regards from France.

Jean-Pierre Sergent, Besançon, Sunday February 7th, 2021