8 x Digressions into the studio with Marie-Madeleine Varet
DIGRESSIONS IN THE STUDIO: SERIES OF EIGHT INTERVIEW VIDEOS BETWEEN ARTIST JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT & THE PHILOSOPHER MARIE-MADELEINE VARET
These eight video interviews were filmed at the Jean-Pierre’s studio in Besançon on the 6th and 7th of October (2016) by Lionel Georges with sound recordings done by Christine Chatelet.
Marie-Madeleine and I had been planning these interviews for more than two years. We had discussed them during numerous meetings at the workshop or during meals together when Marie-Madeleine had returned to Besançon from her many travels during her job. So it was with great joy and emotion that we finally found ourselves together with Lionel and Christine, during those days in October 2016, for the shooting of these small films.
The videos will serve mainly to share the enthusiastic, pertinent, and joyful comments of Marie-Madeleine about my work. We also hope that these videos will facilitate the understanding of Art in general and the openness to welcome this Art in our hearts, as a salutary and conciliatory nourishment for the spiritual development of everyone.
PART 1: THE STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION OF PAINTING
10:32 (filmed in the studio)
- The square units
- The keys for understaning the work, the facets of a rubicube
- Continuous and enveloping work
- Cohesive energy
- Axis mundi, the crossing of the directional axis and historical times
- The surface of the horizontal-vertical wall, the cosmic voyage
- The Energy-movements: centrifugal and centripetal, the core radiation to the universal, the cosmic explosion
- The primordial ocean, multiconsciousness
- Cyclic and nonlinear time
- Protean art work: polymorphic, polygraphic, polyphonic, and polysemic
PART 2: DESIRE IN PAINTING
9:15 (filmed in the studio)
- To Paint is wishing for love
- Vital energy, extreme desire
- The vulva, the vortex, and the female sex
- Fertility, the bodies of women
- Otherness, yin-yang duality, the giving of one’s self
- The organic chaos of desire in contradiction to the geometry of patterns
- Relationships of the very superficial public (thematic)
PART 3: METAPHYSICS IN PAINTING
8:24 (filmed in the studio)
- The tomb of Nefertari, the mural art and the mortuary art
- The question of eternity
- Metamorphosis, the unconscious and the surreal
- Transcendent, transversal, and marginal work
- The memory, the archetype
- The resolution of the whole into the multiple
- The opening of awareness
- The painting is the home of the ritual
- Beyond the painting in metaphysics?
PART 4: ARCHEOLOGY OF THE KNOWLEDGE INTO THE PAINTING
8:28 (filmed in the studio)
- Searching in myths, rites, and the eternally sacred
- The mystic and archaic thoughts of ethnic cultures
- Cross cutting the flesh of the cosmos
- Transcendence of the artistic voyage, the transgression and the odyssey
- Heuristic dimension of the work
PART 5: DIGRESSIONS INTO THE STUDIO
13:43 (filmed in the storage room)
- COLOR, FRAME, MYSTICAL BLUE
PART 6: COMMENTS ON SOME SKETCHES
15:05 (filmed in the studio)
COMMENT ON A CHOICE OF WORKS ON PAPER FROM THE SKETCHES SERIES (1984/2003)
- AMERICAN ODYSSEUS (SHAMANISM)
- GENESIS OF THE WORK, MATRIX: part / detail / fragment constituted from the beginning to make a whole by itself. Unity of Origin
- TITLE (LYRICS OF THE EXHIBITIONS TITLES)
PART 7: COMMENTS ON SOME WORKS ON PAPER
5:56 (filmed in the studio)
- COMMENT ON A CHOICE OF ART PRINTS FROM THE BONES, FLOWERS & ROPES SERIES (2016)
PART 8: COMMENTS ON SOME BOOKS & CONCLUSION
9:11 (filmed in the studio)
0:22 > “Je frissonne. Jamais, jamais plus je n’aurai chaud dans mon sang et dans ma chair.” In La nuit des temps, René Barjavel
1:30 > “Les âmes sorties de ce monde émigrent vers les astres, qui sont des êtres animés.” In La Tentation de saint Antoine, Gustave Flaubert
2:10 > Le chasseur de cigales : ” Quand je suis arrivé à en maintenir trois, je n’en manque plus qu’une sur dix. Quand je suis arrivé à cinq, j’attrape les cigales comme si je les ramassais. A ce stade, je maintiens mon corps immobile comme un tronçon d’arbre plongé dans le sol. Je tiens mon bras inerte comme une branche desséchée. Au milieu de l'immensité de l'Univers et de la multiplicité des choses, je ne connais plus que les cigales, je ne me retourne ni ne me penche. Je n’échangerais pas les ailes d’une cigale contre tous les êtres du monde, comment ne les attraperais-je pas ?” In Œuvre complète, Tchouang-Tseu
3:20 > Les clochards célestes, Jack Kerouac
3:32 > “(On parvient à l’amour divin par l’amour charnel, disait Saint Bernard) Shiva est le principe du plaisir érotique non de la fécondité. Errant dans la forêt, il répand son sperme par des pratiques masturbatoires. Il inspire le désir, la folie érotique. Son fils Skanda est né sans l’intervention d’un élément féminin. Toute la beauté, toute la joie du monde se manifeste par une explosion érotique. Les fleurs jettent leur pollen au vent. La fécondation n’est qu’un accident de parcours dans une manifestation de joie érotique. L’éros ne connais pas de différence de sexes, d’objet. C’est une impulsion intérieure qui s’élance vers la beauté, vers l’harmonie. La création du monde est un acte érotique, un acte d’amour, et tout ce qui existe en porte la marque, le message. Tout est organisé dans les êtres vivants en fonction de cette expression de plaisir, de joie, de beauté, de bonheur, qui est la nature divine et secrète de tout ce qui existe.” In Shiva et Dionysos, Alain Daniélou
CONCLUSION BY MARIE-MADELEINE
- Discussion in front of the wall + (comments of the Mexican masks?)
- Esotericism and symbolism
- Fate and necessity (The resolution of these paradoxes in the cosmic unity of the work)
- Man as an incarnation of this reality
- The Mother Earth Gaia (cross section at the center of the universe)
- The wall installation as a voyage to the center of the earth (and at the same time ascending vertically toward the cosmos…)
PHOTOS OF THE FILMMAKING BY CHRISTINE CHATELET