SUMMER EXHIBITION FROM JUNE 27 TO SEPTEMBER 13, 2025

Opening reception Friday, June 27, 4 to 8 pm and Saturday, June 28, 2 to 7 pm
Closing reception Saturday, September 13, 2 to 7 pm
Opening hours: 2 to 7 pm, Wednesday to Saturday and by appointment. In general, the artist JPS and certain other artists will be present at the gallery on Saturday afternoons from 3 pm to 6 pm.
NB: From July 13 to August 20, the gallery will only be open by appointment with the gallery owner Heidi or JP Sergent.

CONTACTS
Gallery Keller: Heidi Suter | www.kellergalerie.ch | hs.kellergalerie@gmail.com | + 33 (0)9 56 76 45 54 | + 41(0)79 329 58 56
Jean-Pierre Sergent: contact@j-psergent.com | +33 (0)6 73 44 94 86

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– DIRECTIONS                                                                                                                                                                     - POSTER OF THE EXHIBITION

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POSTER, FLYERS & PRESS RELEASES PDF

Dossier de presse (FR) | Press release (ENG) | Affiche A4 | Flyer NB A6

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– CLAUDE BOILLIN-BRETON (born in Poligny, France on July 31 1932) [mail of is son Alain pictura.asso@gmail.com]

 

Trained at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts in the 1950s, she worked for over 30 years as a set designer at the Strasbourg branch of regional television station France 3.

Drawing, painting, and imagination have been her companions throughout my professional life, but it was not until the early 1990s that her retirement allowed her to devote myself entirely to the graphic arts, and more specifically to the technique of reverse glass painting.

This ancient technique reached its peak during the Renaissance and then spread throughout the Western world, mainly in the form of religious subjects, evoking the art of cathedral stained glass.
The principle is to paint with oil directly on the back of the glass, starting with the details of the painting and finishing with the background. The glass protects the painting, giving it a smooth and shiny appearance.

My subjects are varied, ranging from regional culture (Franche-Comté farms, bell towers, fountains, local crafts, pastoral scenes) to floral and animal subjects, or those evoking naïve art, stained glass, or religious icons.

– HER ARTWORKS EXHIBITED

- "kingfisher", oil painting under glass, 43 x 33 cm, 2024

- "Bird of paradise 1", oil painting under glass, 43 x 33 cm, 2024

- "Bird of paradise 2", oil painting under glass, 43 x 33 cm, 2024

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– BARBARA DASNOY (born in Germany in 1951) [barbara_dasnoy@hotmail.fr | www.barbara-dasnoy.com]

– BIOGRAPHY

French-German visual artist born in 1951.
Studied in Göttingen, then taught in the Palatinate.
Moved to France in the 1970s, studied at the Faculty of Arts and the School of Fine Arts in Besançon. 
Obtained her DNSEP. Worked with Jean Ricardon and met Michel Seuphor. Lives in Besançon.
Her work focuses on the relationship between line and gesture with color as the field: a clear, rigorous position, in the tradition of Mondrian, Bram van Velde, and Rothko.

– TEXT BY NATHALIE BECKER, August 2016

Immersing oneself in Barbara Dasnoy's paintings is a unique sensory experience. The artist invites us to lose ourselves in the different spaces that make up her canvases. The lines, patterns, transparencies, overlays, discoveries, and interplay of planes transport us into a world of color and form. 
This German artist, who has lived in Besançon for many years and graduated from the ERBA (École régionale des Beaux-Arts de Besançon), likes to transcribe reminiscences and memories in her art. Thus, in the complex network of lines that animates her compositions, memory becomes a real subject. The invisible takes shape in color and matter. Perhaps this is what Paul Klee meant by “being abstract with memories.” However, when looking at Barbara Dasnoy's work, the divide between abstraction and figuration becomes subtle. There is a palpable power in her drawings. In each composition, we feel the importance of the stroke and the line, the immediacy of the drawing, quick to capture an idea, a reflection, an emotion that the artist then inscribes in the permanence of the pictorial field. 
Barbara Dasnoy thus allows us to apprehend the visible. The network that energizes her canvases is reminiscent of stained glass windows, and the artist seems to be in search of a light and a play of transparency that endow her work with a spiritual momentum. 
And what can we say about Barbara Dasnoy's chromatic rendering and gestural dimension, which here and there evoke the power of Rothko's abstract expressionism? Like the American painter, Barbara invites us on a motionless journey into the heart of the vibration of colors, into the heart of a subtle rhythm that transcends the majesty and mystery of the compositions. While Barbara Dasnoy's work may appear playful at first glance, we need only let our gaze penetrate the fabric to read something more complex, more lyrical. The artist puts her heart and soul into her work, and all the revelations she invites us to explore in the “sediments” of her gestures make her works mental landscapes.

– ABOUT BARBARA'S WORK BY JPS:

I've known and respected Barbara's work for years, and we have some deep affinities, since we had, as she mentions, the same painting teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Besançon, Jean Ricardon, as well as, for several years, the same late gallery owner, Jean Greset. For over ten years, I myself worked in geometric colored abstraction and juxtaposition of monochrome polyptychs, as Barbara does today. But I came out of it (as one comes out of a convent, an asceticism, a school or a love affair...) by returning to figurative painting in Montreal in 1992, when I felt that abstraction was a dead end for me.
So I have a great deal of respect for Barbara's long-standing abstraction in her very, very large-format works, which, frontally and monumentally, evoke, in a subjugating and always indecisive blend, the floating and shifting of body and consciousness, doubts, superimpositions, interweavings, awakenings in the light, deep slumbers in deep blacks and dreams, and then the shifts again from a state of sleep to that of pure consciousness! A clear spiritual awakening and, above all, the static, ecstatic, frontal presence everywhere of the artist's soul: irreverent, curious, playful and childlike, incarnated in full color, like that of a Saint... Question: what, when, how, is this still possible today?
But this painting is a true spiritual embodiment, similarly, why not evoke it here, unashamedly, unabashedly and perhaps emphatically... because no doubt (I guess she appreciates it a lot but never talked about it with her?), her dearly beloved 13th-century compatriot, the Saint, the shaman, the great visionary, the fabulous mystic Hildegarde Von Binguen! 
A big bravo and a big thank you to Barbara for all her superb works, which enchant us and make us want to sing and create, in Joy and Humility. 

– PHOTOS OF THE STUDIO & HER EXHIBITED ARTWORKS:

- 1 - 5, Photos taken in Barbara's studio with Heidi Suter & Jean-Pierre Sergent, May 28, 2025

- 6, “Untitled”, pastel on paper, 2009, 40.8 x 32.2 cm

- 7, “Untitled”, pastel and mixed media on paper, 2007, 36.8 x 45.6 cm

- 8, “Untitled”, pastel and mixed technique on paper, 2007, 45.6 x 36.8 cm

- 9 & 10, Diptychs “Chêne et sapin”, oil pastel on paper, 2027, 61.5 x 51.5 cm

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– EILBHE DONOVAN (born in Ireland)  [eilbhedonovan@gmail.com | www.eilbhedonovan.com]

– JEAN-MICHEL JAQUET (born and died in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1950 - 2022) [mail of his wife Magali from the Association Le Porteur de Ciel [mph.artconsulting@sunrise.ch | SIKART]

– BIOGRAPHY 

After studying graphic art in Geneva, he devoted himself entirely to drawing. For forty years, he exhibited regularly in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and occasionally in France as well. The inventor of a graphic language of signs that is both personal and universal, he explored in his work the great themes that have stirred humanity since time immemorial: love, death, pain, betrayal, the thirst for power, violence, poetry, freedom, and also the animal world, to which he gave a particular symbolism.
After working for some twenty years in France, Egypt, and Corsier-sur-Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds, his hometown, with his wife Magali, who was his close collaborator for more than twenty-five years.
Seriously ill, he continued to draw from his bed in very small notebooks, demonstrating until the end his visceral connection to drawing, which was more than a passion, it was a vital necessity for him. Today, his works are featured in numerous public and private collections.

Some of his small aphorisms:

Paper is the last virgin land to
explore. Its whiteness hides its depth.
To draw is to sink into the forest. 

Through the line, I can better connect what is
ordinarily perceived as separate. It is a system
of signs where humans, mountains, and animals are
woven into the river of the world.

Drawing: that place where everything is allowed and where
so little is possible.

Drawing cannot deceive; it always tells the truth
about its author, whether skilled or unskilled,
professional or occasional. All
drawings are self-portraits; we reveal ourselves
through drawing.

Small drawing: tremendous desire.

– A LITTLE ANECDOTE FROM JPS ABOUT JEAN-MICHEL JAQUET 

Once upon a time, during a canoe trip to Saut du Doubs, in the Jura Mountains, the land of my childhood, a magnificent, enchanting and magical place on the French-Swiss border, I met Jean-Michel with his wife Magali, some years ago. We chatted a little on the restaurant terrace about art in general and our somewhat similar artistic backgrounds, and got on well. Then, in 2022, Jean-Michel sadly passed away, and two years later, Nicolas Droz, the owner, dedicated a beautiful exhibition to him last year, in the summer of 2024, in the rooms of his beautiful home. It was in this way that I was really able to discover, personally, some of his works on paper: superb and marvellous drawings, very erotic and irreverent... free, anarchistic and full of life... Here are some passages from important critical texts that have been written about his work, which I invite you to read. 
I must say, I'm particularly delighted to welcome five of these works to this exhibition. Bravo and congratulations to the artist for all the magnificent works he has left us, and also to his wife, Magali, who takes care of giving them to us or giving them back to us to see.

– EXTRACT FROM A CRITICAL TEXT BY FRANÇOISE JAUNIN in SIKART, 1998, Dictionary of Art in Switzerland
 

Until 1972, Jaquet's early drawings, which hover in the shadow of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco de Goya, were mainly in the fantastic vein. In these complex, abundant compositions, the third dimension gradually flattened out, giving pride of place to line alone. From 1973 onwards, the polysemic use of line, in pencil and Indian ink as well as in oil and lithographic ink, became the driving force behind his work, in which color - if any - sometimes has a symbolic function, sometimes the role of humus from which the line is born. In addition to his painting, Jaquet also writes, sometimes in the form of poems, more often in the form of writings and studio notes that mark out and nourish his creative process.
A calligrapher of the body and reinventor of myths, he has an almost organic relationship with paper, his almost exclusive medium. His figures are born of meaning, as they emerge from the white of the page or the sedimented humus of color. Recurrent and obsessive, they emerge from an intimate reservoir of emblematic objects of fascination, including St. Christopher bearing the Divine Child, twin figures and couples united in love, which speak of a nostalgia for original wholeness, the eye that becomes a vulva, the volcano that is also a pubic triangle, Genesis, which recounts the origin of the world and its forms, and the fallen angel and crucifixion, which recall intolerable failure.
Jaquet walks a razor's edge between wild improvisation and learned mastery, a distant heir to the painters of Lascaux or Altamira, a solitary cousin to the inventors of what art historian Harald Szeemann has dubbed “individual mythologies”. In his singular work, everything is played out in a fertile back-and-forth between impulse and intellect, between the gesture rising from inner depths and past memories and its crystallization in signs and archetypes tirelessly catalogued, like the ideograms of a universal, ageless alphabet.

– HIS EXHIBITED ART WORKS: 

- 1, "La Stèle", 1997, Encre bleue et gouache sur journal Financial Time, 56 X 39,5 cm, marouflé sur Vélin d’Arches 70 X 50 cm

- 2, "Sans-titre", 1997, Encre bleue et gouache sur journal Financial Time, 56 X 39,5 cm, Marouflé sur Vélin d’Arches 70 X 50 cm  

- 3, "Triviale chevauchée", 2003, craies, sanguine et graphite sur papier Canson, 20,8 X 14,8 cm, encadrée 21 X 15 cm

- 4, "Sans-titre (Fresque vivante)", 1987, craies et sanguine sur papier-cartonné, 16,5 X 23 cm, encadrée 17 X 23,5 cm

- 5, "Sans-titre" (Homme et cochon), 1983, graphite sur Canson, 25,5 X 29 cm, encadrée 26 X 30 cm

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– GUIMBARDE (1950-2024) [daughter's email Fanny]

– BIOGRAPHY

Noël GIRARD-CLOS, known as “Guimbarde”, was born on December 27, 1950, in Delle, in the Territoire de Belfort. His nickname refers to the musical instrument of the same name, which he played so well.

Inspired by nature and music from an early age, he built his life by devoting himself fully and passionately to Art. As a traveler, he was open to the world and to different cultures, particularly when he lived on Reunion Island in the 70s.

A student at the Besançon School of Fine Arts, Guimbarde has participated in numerous exhibitions, notably in Besançon and in his beloved Franche-Comté region.

Simple, authentic and wholehearted, Guimbarde was an atypical character. A devout believer, he saw himself as a 'pilgrim-Christian' artist, and attached great importance to his faith.

He passed away on October 30, 2024, at the age of 73, leaving behind a rich and colorful cultural heritage.

– ABOUT: “THE ANTHROPOID DEER SMILING IN A VORTEX OF BUTTERFLIES”, PAINTING FROM 1994, BY JPS.

 

“Blessed are the people (the Iroquois) who have left no name in history, and whose heritage has been collected only by the deer of the woods and the birds of the air! No one will come to deny the Creator in these wild retreats and, scales in hand, weigh the powder of the dead, to prove the eternity of the human race.” Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme #1

 

This fascinating work by our dear friend Guimbarde, painter and troubadour, plunges us all - if we still have a bit of heart and soul too - into the depths of prehistoric human times. 
These are the deep, fertile times that once belonged to the primitive peoples, the 'savages', the animists, the sorcerers, the unpolished barbarians, the shamans, the sages, the druids, the animals, the gods and the enlightened, and which today have all been stolen from us... 
So this “primitive” scene reminds us of those paradisiacal, fallen times, and it represents exactly the moment, the place in time and space where, before our astonished eyes, the secret metamorphosis takes place: the incarnation and transformation of Man into Animal, and more precisely, in the Stag, the “Master of Animals” himself, according to Abbé de Breuil*.
The work also describes a revealing moment in which the spiritual becomes incarnate, and simultaneously, a tipping point into deep dreaming and cosmic travel. This is where we meet our 'animal spirit', in the afterlife and in other worlds, in the chaotic, matrix-like interconnections where Life exchanges with Death, give and take! 
This is also the very source of the vortex of souls that travel from West to East, around the Earth, after death, in the interstellar spaces of the Bardo Thödol. These souls are incarnated, in this painting as in real life, after the end of the body, in farandoles of joyful butterflies, in an inescapable cosmic moment of revelation of the ultimate truth... 
Metamorphosis and dreams recurring again and again. The power and magical smile of the innocent man, incarnated, like the soul of sorcerers and shamans, in this work, so powerful that it even frightened her, according to what she told me, her daughter Fanny, when she was a little child... As indeed do all true myths and legends, as well as all encounters with the physical presences of the great saints, or even Christs or mystics.
And so it is this apparition, this man-animal-god change, both divine and savage, that our friend Guimbarde offers us mortals in this marvellous painting, breathtaking in its joy, candour and love, but also so overpoweringly human! Thank you, artist friend, for this wonderful painting... 

* - see the attached illustration of the “Horned God” from the Grotte des Trois-Frères, decal by Abbé Breuil (Middle Magdalenian, 14000 BP)

– HIS EXHIBITED ART WORK: 

- "The Anthropoid Deer Smiling in a Vortex of Butterflies, 1994, engraved plate painted with oil, 100 x 72 cm

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SAMIRA SAHRA NAWARD (born in 1980 in Tehran, Iran) [sahranavards@yahoo.com | instagram]

– BIOGRAPHY

Art teacher, art historian, writer, illustrator and painter.

– ABOUT HER EXHIBITED ARTWORK

The painting “World Peace” has a different meaning for today's women. It symbolizes peace and coexistence without war or bloodshed. This “World Peace” painting represents the blue sky in which all the women and children of the world, and indeed all living beings, joyfully send colored flags skyward. Peace in the World of Women means a world where all women dance and laugh, continue to live in peace and freedom, and have the right to choose their Life.

– ABOUT SAMIRA, BY JPS

I've been in touch with Samira for several years now, on Instagram, and we like each other because of our artistic works, which are different but always liberating for the human condition and for women in particular. I came up with the idea of asking her to show one of her works in this exhibition, which is not an easy thing to do, since it's very difficult to send a work from Iran... And I chose this very beautiful, highly colored painting, in which she expresses visions springing directly from her psyche and her love... in the manner of shamans, mystics, Iranian, Mongolian or Hindu sages, or even like innocent children, in the manner of a list to Santa Claus, in the West. 
Everything takes place in geographical, cosmic and visionary dimensions, as we see several countries symbolizing freedom, such as Paris and its Eifel Tower, Planet Earth, certain Chinese bridges, as well as places where animals live: turtles, dolphins, birds and little flowers in the mountains... And then, above all, the word PEACE written on two arms of different colors... 
His work touches us, invites us, even obliges us, all of us, to deeply and viscerally wish that the whole World, and of course his country in particular, Iran, could finally allow everyone, men, women, children and all living creatures, to live in peace and harmony in respect, friendship, brotherhood, consorality and Universal Freedom. Let's hope very much that the vision of Samira, an Iranian artist, will soon become a reality.

– HER EXHIBITED ARTWORK:

- "Peace, Woman, Art", 2024, ink and painting on paper,  53 x 38 cm, 2024

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– JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT (born in 1958 in Morteau, France)

– BIOGRAPHY

French-New-York painter (1993-2003), now living and working in Besançon. His serigraphic works of paint on Plexiglas and paper have been exhibited internationally since the 90s: in Canada, the United States, Europe, Iran and China since 2016.
Her work is both a marvel at life and its transience, and a vibrant tribute to the colossal energy of life in its human-cultural continuity and timeless cosmic infinity: a gushing presence of erotic desire from the mists of time and cosmic-mystical beauty.

– ABOUT THE PAINTING “MAYAN DIARY #95”: LIFE, BUTTERFLIES, ORGANIZED CHAOS, ART, SPIRITUALITY, CULTURES AND THE RIGHT COLORS

It was essential and vital for us human beings, for hundreds of millennia, to organize, imagine and plan our Worlds geographically, spiritually, politically and 'cosmically'. As in this Aztec calendar, with its months of the Rabbit, the Eagle, the Jaguar, Death, Rain etc... With the plenipotentiary priest, at its center, in the Axis Mundi to be exact, performing rituals to regenerate and redistribute the order of Life and Time by invoking the forces of lightning, bodies, blood and sun in a vortex of butterflies! 

All the great ancient civilizations or human organizations, tribes, families etc. had organized, built, defined and established, to live together from birth to death: places, temples, rivers, trees or even stones, dedicated to their rituals of passage where they could gather together, in order to communicate with what we nowadays call, by convention and also a little mockingly, we must admit, the Spirits, the Gods, the Beyond, the Other Worlds or the Kamis (the spirit of things and beings in Japanese)....
Today, however, most of these places have been desacralized, and all that remains of them are ruins, scraps, residual fragments, crumbs, a few traces... left bare and forgotten, here and there, by the sad and devastating advance of the great history of industrialization and desacralization of the World. Yet these places still welcome myriads of fervent and stupid tourists, the indecorably 'smartphoned' humans... reminiscent, no doubt, of Worlds and practices that humanity once knew, long ago already...

Because the links with the Earth, the Sun, the Animals, the Stars, the marvellous universes and the tutti quanti, are no longer made or created, nor do they help anyone, any human being, to access another level, this higher, transcendent spiritual level.
However, certain links can still be felt, sometimes, in the Arts, such privileged spaces, because Art remains today, it seems to me, at least for me, one of the only places, the last place and the last refuge perhaps, of a reflective surface, a mirror where man can still find a way, a way of remaining humbly and desperately Human, and where, perhaps one last time, we can rediscover this full and complete dimension, charged with spiritual energy through the experience of Life, Death, the body, orgasm, invigorating colors and mystical ecstasies? Let's hope so, despite all our despair!

Jean-Pierre Sergent, Besançon, June 7, 2025

– ABOUT THE “SKETCHES” FROM NEW YORK (1993-2003):

The Sketches are working notes and sketches to organize the color of paintings and their dimensions in the exhibition space; drawings of artworks discovered in museums as well as working ideas and concepts. The sketches are also used to plan the organization of the various stages involved in producing the silkscreens: cutting the rolls of paper, cutting the positive film, cleaning the screens with a Karcher and exposing them, choosing the images and colors to be printed, taking photos of the paintings, etc...

 

– TEXT BY MARIE-MADELEINE VARET, PHILOSOPHER

Dear Jean-Pierre, what wonder! 
I never tire of re-discovering the abundant richness of your sketches, the power of their impact on the sensitive and spiritual world... the Alpha and Omega of an inner journey.
How does the invisible structure of a form determine its appearance? We must discover what's hidden behind what we see in order to understand what we see. 
To show what is not visible (to the naked eye).
Infinite gratitude to you for your inspiration and brilliant intuitions!

– HIS EXHIBITED ARTWORKS: 

- 1, "Mayan Diary #95", peinture acrylique sérigraphiée et acrylique peinte au dos de plaques de Plexiglas, encadré : 1,40 x 1,40 m, 2010

- 2 - 5, 4 x “Sketches from New York,” pencil, colored pencil & felt-tip pen on white paper, 28 x 21,7 cm, 1994 - 2002

- 6, "Sketch of New York, colored pencil, felt-tip pen & burnt subway map, on white paper, 17 x 10,8 cm, 2000