Karine Bertrand: Hello Jean-Pierre.

Jean-Pierre Sergent: Hello Karine.

KB: I am delighted to be here and thank you for your invitation.

JPS: You're more than welcome! 

KB: So, we're going to share this little moment together, so you invited me for my skills as a sexologist?

JPS: Yes, but not only that, I think you really appreciate my work... And so it was an idea to have a little exchange like that, a little informal, to discuss a little bit about my work and about life in general...

KB: Yes, I hear the question of the sacred, of the sublimation of pleasure and of a very transversal jouissance. I hear the question of pleasure-pain. So there, the sexologist will say: always if it is framed, desired and played. Because sex must always be played. But in the meantime, I hear well indeed. 

JPS: But Art is a game! 

KB: Indeed and in the end, we are always a little in limit games, of invitation; and it is true that, after the transcendence in the climax, it is for me a gift that one can make through the desire and the sexual pleasure. It is a real fundamental question. And what about in your work…? Because, what also appealed to me, for sure, when you talk about pornography there is this paradoxical side to it, I think?

JPS: Absolutely, yes, you are right! 

JPS: Would you like to talk about the different levels of reading? 

KB: Yes, the different levels of reading... What did you mean by the dance, to enter the erotic dance? 

JPS: Yes, my work is an invitation: that's it! To enter into the dance, of course, the artist's true role is to play a game with the spectator, of course, because nobody really paint for oneself alone; it's not interesting. And then... you have to find partners who want to dance the same dance as you and with you. It's not that easy, of course.

KB: It's not so obvious, because for you, you paint? Because painting can be also sublimatory in itself, that is to say therapeutic, introspective, expulsive and one can keep, in the end, one's creation to oneself? ...

About a few prints of the new "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes" 2022 series.

KS: Well, it makes me think of the Orient, you know those windows where...

JPS: Exactly, the moucharabiehs, yes. 

KB: Yes, where you are hidden and revealed, in the background, right? The suggestion is that behind this window you see parts of body. For me, it is a very oriental representation of the feminine behind this window which is often very charged very intricate an entanglement were we often see, as there, snatches of the eroticised body...

KB: And now, let's talk about the patterns?

JPS: Yes, we use that word in English!

KB: Well, to each his own, but on the question of the repetitive pattern, when I naively asked you, I admit it, what was the pattern or the repetitive pattern; and in repetitive, you see, right away, it makes me think of dance.

JPS: Yes, dance or sexuality... 

KB: Sexual dance and the repetition of something or not always... But yes, on the question of the repetitive pattern, on this erotic dance, on this suggestive dance? Which is, at the end, a ritual and an erotic and suggestive dance of the bodies...