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My paintings are germinations, cosmogonies, energy systems, artistic exterminations.... One must look
at my paintings not as paintings, not as art objects, but as some sacred spaces
of conflicts and creations. An enclosed, chaotic, ethereal space where several
energies mix together, attract each other, harmonize and destroy each other, and
transmute into pure energy. My approach is more shamanic than esthetic and more
alchemical than philosophical. I always have been fascinated
by painting done on supports other than canvas or wood panels. For example, prehistoric
cave paintings, paintings on Greek, Mayan and Moche vases; paintings in Egyptian
tombs and sarcophagi, Islamic ceramics, prehistoric Chinese pottery, Aztec and
Mayan codices, manuscripts of the Middle Ages, Tibetan mandalas, graffiti quickly
written on modern city walls, Indian miniatures, mola blouses of the Kuna Indians
of Panama, Tierra del Fuego Selk'man Indian painted body spirits, finger imprints
on the mud of the cave ceiling of Pech-Merle, Siberian and American shaman drums,
painted loincloths on bark strips of the Mbuti and Mangbetu Pygmies, Japanese
shunga on rice paper, magic paintings on Sioux teepees, Australian aboriginal
dream maps on bark, sandpaintings of the Navajo medicine man, paintings on wooden
shields made by the Asmat people of New Guinea, Mexican and Guatemalan ceremonial
masks, etc... I have also been fascinated by painting
done before the advent of architecture, for architecture (except that of the ancient
Egyptian, Mayan, Greek, Aztec, Inca, Assyrian civilizations, and that of cathedral
builders) has completely killed artistic freedom and expression by converting
imagery into a window frame, and it has subordinated, constrained and annihilated
through its utilitarian and profane function: the mysteries of the unconscious,
all kinds of magic, the earth's telluric energies, cosmogonies, the connections
womb-dwelling, mythologies, communal social structures, dreams and all the directional
spiritual axes. Finally, painting as pictures get me bored and totally alienate
me, because it remains a narrow, bourgeois, representational, European and religious
way of picturing the world. Let's get rid of the idea of the "painting"! My work is about beauty, freedom and ecstasy in sexual and in spiritual experience, there in the heart of the scene of creation. The act of ejaculating into the stars and in the warm womb of a woman who is at her climax, in the eye, in the gaze of the cosmos. The beauty of the body of a woman who is sucking a cock while being fucked. The color of pleasure, the juice that runs out of her pussy lips, that door open over the clouds of Baudelaire, Axis Mundi, between yesterday and tomorrow. My only spirituals values: the tone of your skin, the curved shadows of your tits, the irrational blackness of your hairy triangle, the powerful bloody veins of trees and rivers, the subtle impermanence of the wind, the sexual viscosity of the fishes, the crazy swarming of insects, the near death silence of stones, the black and blue shadow of the night, the joyous yellow supernumerary of stars... I am a life and life is light, passionate, violent... Images, colors and forms devour each other, fight each other, love each other, revolt against each other... And somewhere, some kind of shaman with an over powerful heart infiltrates himself; he is here, universal stream of light, and life is infinite and sexed.
PLAZA HOTEL Beauty is Energy "With beauty may I walk" The Night Navajo Chant Before money, by inscribing time in history, violently dispossessed us of our happiness, beauty was related to interior time, like an organ, an aura, a cosmic harmony. Our freedom rests in finding our way back to this cosmic time, the time of yellow and black bees, red ants, ladybugs that spoke to the spirits, golden beetles that are God's messengers, birds of paradise and flowers of exuberant sensuality. Man had understood this empirically during thousands and thousands of years, because Nature had made Herself beautiful and desirable in order to survive and Man imitated Her. Beauty is the breath of life, as essential as desire, the only hope of survival in a chaotic and dangerous world. More than an esthetic notion, it is a spiritual value, a tangible way to communicate with the reigning spirits of the visible and invisible world. In this way, every tree leaf is a love song that we must once more learn to listen to.
PLAZA HOTEL The energy and the power of a shamanic trance is an experience beyond the power of every common dreams. I personally experienced such a shamanic metamorphosis, and some of the paintings I will show are amemory of such out of body trances. I strongly believe that contemporary spirituality should strive towards more of those shamanistic practices. Primarily because those trances teach us that every things are connected, every being requires respect, every thing has a meaning and a purpose including our true self¹s as we all are dependent upon the so called "great spirit", the "anima mundi" or the "red womb of the earth". We can not dissociate one flower from the sun or from butterflies, dolphins, mountains, jaguars, hawks and the human body. Every spirit merges with another. It is pure experience of fusion and love. This strong and humble connection is in total conflict with the pretentious attitude of contemporary man who dissociates and separates all that surrounds him with the help of science, economics, politics and religion. We are experiencing an age of globalization based on a premise that business is the only logical connection between cultures. This expanding state-controlled economy and structure seems to survive from one economic empire to the next. It seems unchallenged except by artists or some indigenous cultures around the world who won't allow their soil to be exploited and their soul to be enslaved by work. Empires inflate themselves as they grow, however there is no room for more expansion on ours planet Earth, neither inside of the human social body, where every human look and act already like a neurotic zombie. So should humanity jump happily into outer space for an other Empire to expand? Alternatively can we go back to some more humanist and reasonable economical systems? A system based on ecology, humility, pleasure, compassion, peace and reciprocity. One can always dream!
SUSPENDED TIME
French
Institute Painting is the interrogation of the moment, of time immovable, it's the acid that gnaws at the marrow of our memory, lying there crushed, gaping, exposed. The image is like a tool that pierces, that thrusts its symbols into the heart of personal time. What is stopped is actually to become, the instant repeats itself ad infinitum. The water, the stars, the death, the scripture, the fire... The metamorphosis of an inert image into a magical one. The silence opens up a psychic vacuum, thirsty for life and for blood... Game of exchange, we will become what we have seen...  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dancing with Discontinuous
Images During a trip to France last summer, I encountered Georges Bataille's thoughts in his book Eroticism. In this book, Bataille conceptualizes the discontinuity of existence : the fatality of the human being in a perpetual quest for primordial uniqueness, a state accessible only in death or through ritual or erotic trances. This idea influenced the content of my own work which is realized in the assemblage of plexiglass pieces, fragmentary images of beings or things, arranged in a square format, mounted on a wall, creating a complete and flowing work. This format of display allows the continuity of space and time to be restored, bringing the spectator to new non-linear spaces. My search, like Bataille's, is also centered on one question : how to live today in a society which is devoid of spirituality and has lost any sense of sacred, a society that is essentially sacrilegious? I draw my inspiration from history, daily news and my own experience. I choose images, gestures and symbols which resonate beyond concrete and materiel reality. Whether the significations of my work are sacred or profane does not matter, as long as the images convey some meaning or power. In my work, given my vision and goals, I necessarily incorporate images of the taboo, the forbidden, the violent or the erotic. Many of the images I am drawn to have been suppressed, even banned, from various societies at certain times, and then accepted or widely diffused in other times and places. The more I reflect on what the artistic process should be, the more I think I should move towards Mircéa Eliade's idea... "All creation implies a superabundance of reality, that is to say eruption of the sacred in the world".
Wall Street, or The Relentless Flight "The horizon lights up, seven or twelve suns appearing in the sky, drying up the seas and burning the earth. The fire Samvartaka will destroy the universe in its entirety." The Mahabharata. And when the last flower has disappeared and when the last star has gone out, I would like to remember this sweet planet that was called Earth. And you work towards that extinction, from all sides and by all means. You feel a need to extract, you feel a need to pump, you feel a need to transform, you feel a need to clear the forests of their trees, you feel a need to drain, you feel a need to sterilize, you feel a need to slaughter, you feel a need to enslave, you feel a need to exterminate, you feel a need to exploit, you feel a need to conquer, you feel a need to industrialize, you feel a need to commodify... Don't allow for respite, time is money, produce, time is money, produce, time is money, overproduce, with your wan expressions of tardy adolescents. A society of the profoundly feeble who exterminated the Indians, who enslaved the Blacks and today deport the Mexicans. You only know how to produce shit in boxes and then export it. Your subculture reigns in the empire of the greedy, the blind and the arrogant. Your art reeks of ennui and of misery. Your society is divided up, spread out, distributed like the parts of a body which no longer wanted to exist. There are ghettos all over the place to help people find an identity, The One Legged Lesbian Club, Jews Exiled Forever, The Club for Moustached Homosexuals, The Obese by at Least 400-pounds Club, The Irish and their Lovely St.Patrick's Day Parade Club, the Club of the Non-Sexually Harassed, the Not Very Popular African-Americans Club... And all those ghettos form mini-societies, protected by their own private lawyers. What misery, what cowardice, what a stench. If this, the epitome of mass consumption, were to collapse, it would provoke the end of the Empire, the end of the World. But come to think of it, the end of what World? | |
| All texts and images are © of Jean-Pierre Sergent 1996-2009 | design by elaine scola | webmaster cyrcle.org |
