Shakti-Yoni: Ecstatic Cosmic Dances | 2019 | Art Prints On White B.F.K. Rives Paper 250g

Shakti*-Yoni*: Ecstatic Cosmic Dances | 2019 | Art Prints On White B.F.K. Rives Paper 250g

The série Shakti-Yoni: Ecstatic Cosmic Dances is a series begun in Autumn 2016 at the Besançon studio. It is printed mainly in unique prints and limited editions of 5, unframed size dimensions: 25,5 x 25,5 cm / 10''x10''.

- #1 - # 143: Unique prints, acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink on white B.F.K. Rives paper 250g
- #144 - #71: Unique prints and limited editions of five, acrylic hand silk-screened on white B.F.K. Rives paper 250g.

Shakti-Yoni: Ecstatic Cosmic Dances

"It is pleasure which is the substance of the world. It brings us closer to the divine state."
In Shiva and Dionysos, Alain Daniélou

These bodies of women ecstatically dancing, like the exctatict dancing Dervishes Turners, are both fixed points here, and infinite there. They drag us with them in whirling and cosmic dimensions, creating in a true sense vortices of energies towards the possibilities of other lives, other pleasures, other experiences. Most of the pictures come from erotic videos of Oily Micro Bikini Dancing, in which young female Japanese strippers, with oil lubricated bodies, dance while masturbating to the rhythm of obsessive techno music (alienating, mindless, binary and repetitive), squirming sexually, in a primitive, barbaric, archaic, Dionysian ritual. They present to us, ostentatiously and spasmodically, their breasts with erect nipples, their genitals and all their orifices (mouths, anuses, and vaginas). Their Yonis, moist, gushing, obscene, and wet, with gaping lips ... symbols of the female sex, which in the same way in India are adorned, fed, and coated with butter, flowers, and various offerings and always pierced by the lingam*, Herculean cock rising towards the sky…
Genitals open, offered, desiring… those female warriors are hoping for a man’s cock and his cum, in such an exciting and regenerating homage danced as in Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, but, in this never-ending and eternal dance, there is no need to wait for the Seasons to come back in order to revive their humongous desires…! Hoping all the same, transcendent, orgiastic, animalistic, and tantric sexual love. During these trance-dances, they develop a hyper-feminine and hyper-sexual excitement, such as that of the energizing, enveloping, destructive, extraterrestrial, super-powerful, and oversized energy of the Female Shakti’s energy of desires; vibrations of full-body orgasmic waves, like burning fires of gushing love. Breasts and Yonis offered, open like endless wells where one would lose oneself to extinguish one's ego and insatiable desire, in an alienating and liberating spiral, hoping for these spiritual journeys, entwined with the Divine light, the All, the One. The same ones that follow the soul of the dead in the Buddhist Bardos in different worlds of the afterlife...
Jerky movements, pulsing rhythmically, or arhythmically, in a despairing contemporary pornographic solitude, which still bring us back sometimes to the origin of being, primary energy, the first cries of the child brought into the world or the first orgasm. In the same way that the Water, the Sea, the Ocean, and the Universe, encompass, submerge, and nourish us like the orphans we are all today, since the Spirits and the Gods are dead; killed by those other than us!
But the artist remains optimistic and he tirelessly pays tribute to the dance ... to Nature ... to the color ... and to the feminine energy of the Shakti-Yoni force...!

Jean-Pierre Sergent, Besançon, November 27th 2016

* Shakti is the concept or personification of divine feminine creative power, sometimes referred to as “The Great Divine Mother” in Hinduism.
* Yoni (womb, uterus, vagina, vulva or source) is a stylised representation of female genitalia representing the goddess Shakti in Hinduism The male counterpart of the yoni is the lingam. The union of the yoni and lingam represents the eternal process of creation and regeneration, the union of male and female principles, and all existence.
* Lingam is a column-like or oval (egg-shaped) symbol of Shiva, the Formless All-pervasive Reality. It is an abstract or aniconic representation of the Hindu deity, Shiva. The lingam is often represented as resting on yoni.
(Wikipedia)

TEXT BY MARIE-MADELEINE VARET | PHILOSOPHER

Lush!
This new series is part of the continuum of copious works in which the artist celebrates the Woman: "the image of the shakti, the power and joy of the gods who, without her, have no existence." The guardian figure of Alain Daniélou radiates in this offering of a Shivaism that was lived as an erotic religion: "Shiva lives in a state of perpetual erotic joy," he wrote. "Voluptuousness and happiness are fundamental elements of existence." He added: "The first symbol of Shiva is a phallus, the most obvious symbol of the principle of life."

Jean-Pierre Sergent's work embodies and illustrates this original intuition: when opposites come together, the imbalance, the tension that gives birth to beings, disappears, and the experience of pleasure and of joy results. That is why it is said that the state of permanent stability is a state of perpetual pleasure, of eternal joy. For the living being, it is only in the union of opposites that the state of happiness appears. It is only in the brief moment when two beings become one, when desire is pacified, that a fragment of happiness is felt. This state of joy is as close as we can get to the state of liberation.

The union of the phallus and the female organ is the symbol of divine reality as well as cosmic and physical reality. This union is the origin and end of existence, as well as the cause of its continuation. The sexual act is therefore the most important of the rites and, performed as a rite, is the most effective way to participate in the cosmic work. All the other rituals are the image of this union and symbolically reproduce it. Agni, the god of fire, the male principle, manifests himself in the kunda, the focus of the altar, the image of the female. The Upanishads explain all aspects of the ritual of sacrifice as well as the different stages of the act of love.
"The woman is the home, the male organ is the fire, the caresses are the smoke, the vulva is the flame, the penetration the poker, and the pleasure the spark. In this fire, the gods sacrifice the seed and a child is born." (Chândogya Upanishad, 5, 4-8).

Adventure and Odyssey, this iconoclastic journey where Jean-Pierre Sergent takes us is a journey that puts into images, music, and words a sacred, immemorial and vivid story.

Access to the works and universe of this extraordinary artist is the privilege of a lifetime as well as a principle of life.

Marie-Madeleine Varet, Paris, November 8th 2018