Works on paper: "The Forgotten Portfolio 2" | New York, 1993-1994

THE FORGOTTEN & MYSTERIOUS PORTFOLIO: PRESS IMAGES CLIPS, DUALITY, AFFINITIES & CONFRONTATIONS [silkscreen from NEW YORK, 1993-1994]

“For me, it is perpetual pain and the shadow and night of the soul, and I have no voice to cry out.”

Antonin Artaud, Fragments of a Journal from Hell

I have always had this irresistible and irrepressible need to gather and collect images, ever since I was a child. Back in the early 1990s, when I was living in Montreal and in New York, I would always buy the Sunday New York Times edition every week without fail, and I would quickly and eagerly scan through it, looking for images that would catch my eye. It didn't matter how they will atracted me, whether they provoked excitement, disgust, aversion, or simply emotion and/or desire! 
I needed to take stock of the noisy world I was living in at the time and, very often, of the madness of our capitalistic society and the immense ultra-desire or terror that these images, which imposed themselves on me as if they were being told, recounted, narrated, in yet another ultimate night of Scheherazade before a probable death. 
What would happen next to the world and to me, no one knows and no one will ever know, but his small silkscreen prints, found in this mysterious portfolio, after having disappeared and lain dormant for nearly 30 years, bear witness to my presence and my desire to be in the world and to bear witness, as an artist, to those years in North America in the 1990s...

Jean-Pierre Sergent, artist, Besançon, October 27, 2025

- ORIGIN OF IMAGES & TECHNIQUES:

Most of the images used in these new series come from press clippings, which I first resized to a rectangular format with a ratio of 1/2, measuring 35 by 17.5 centimeters, then photocopied to produce positive screen printing films, which I then screen printed on different types of paper: newspaper itself, on 250g screen printing paper, sometimes enhanced with acrylic paint, or on photocopies of press articles on acid-free paper. 
In this 1994 New York series, I also screen-printed photographs that I had taken myself in nature of the beautiful snowy landscapes of the Jura and Alps mountains: trees, animals, snow, rocks, and rivers...  

- DIMENSIONS:

The dimensions of these silkscreen works vary and they are all unique prints. Here are the approximate sizes of the main ones:

- 1 - 111, “The Hidden Silkscreens,” 1993, hand-silkscreened acrylic paint on white Morilla paper, unique print, 23 x 18 inches
- 112 - 120, “The Hidden Silkscreens,” 1993, hand-silkscreened acrylic paint and linocut on white Morilla paper, single print, 58.5 x 45.5 cm
- 121-182, “The Hidden Silkscreens, Press Clips,” 1993, hand-screen-printed acrylic paint on mass-colored paper, single print, 30 x 40 cm