My dear friend Johnes Ruta (curator and art critic) decided to read the text TRANSVERSALITY by my dear friend Marie-Madeleine Varet (philosopher), which he had liked very much, and so here is this beautiful impromptu video:

- An excerpt from the philosopher Marie-Madeleine Varet, French. On the work of the artist Jean-Pierre Sergent : TRANSVERSALITY. It is part of the traversée of contemporary art, a journey, a path: "... there is no end, only the path. But I'd like to be, modestly and on my own scale, like the great jazz drummers: jazz drummers are always just a little ahead of the music playing, and that's what makes the soloists pulsate and throws the musicians they accompany totally forward. When you're slightly ahead of the beat, it's because you're doing your job well." Jean-Claude Guillaumon, "L'art, fabrication ou transgression", 2007.


Series of photos showing artist Jean-Pierre Sergent working during Summer 2024 on the various stages of the artistic working process, in his studio in Besançon, for the realization of the new "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes" series, part II.
Acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink printed on yellow Wang Sketching 80g paper & on Rives B.F.K. white paper 250g, size 80 x 60 cm. Unique prints.

In particular, I quote and comment on the following important books, with this quotation by Robert Byron from his book, From Russia to Tibet:

CONFESSION OF A TRAVELLER

"As a member of a community and heir to a culture that are today equally controversial, I wanted to discover ideas - if indeed those of the West were outdated - likely to improve the course of the World and, to this end, also to know, via the language of my own sensibility, the beings and things that constitute THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLD.*"

OTHER BOOKS:
- RIPRAP, GARY SNYDER
- KWAÏDAN, STORIES AND STUDIES OF STRANGE THINGS, LAFCADIO HEARN
- THE SUPERHUMAN LIFE OF GUÉSAR DE LING, THE TIBETAN HERO, ALEXANDRA DAVID-NÉEL
- THE DEATH OF BALZAC, OCTAVE MIRBEAU
- THE KING AND THE CORPSE, HEINRICH ZIMMER
- RELATING, IN DEPTH, IN COINCIDENCE TWO SIMILAR SUBJECTS EVOKED IN FILMED INTERVIEWS: NICKY DE ST PHALLE (ARTIST) -1965- & AURÉLIEN BARROU (ASTROPHYSICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER) > "THE TECHNO-PHALIC VERSUS THE VULVO-ENGLOBING", JUNE 2024, etc...

A few 360° photos extracted from the film shoot in partnership with Agence Vauban of Besançon (Mathieu Allard); camera and images by Mathis Jacquerot, filmed on location on May 29 2024. Discover, as if you were there, the three different rooms of the studio where the artist has been working since 2004, after his return from New York. Of particular interest are the large-scale mural installation of paintings on Plexiglas (3.15 x 6.30 m), the silkscreen equipment, the Mexican sculptures and masks and the two bookshelves, which we hope you'll enjoy discovering... Watch the interactive video on Matterport

Documentary film shot in partnership with Agence Vauban of Besançon (Mathieu Allard); camera and images by Mathis Jacquerot, filmed on location on May 29 2024. Discover, as if you were there, the three different rooms of the studio where the artist has been working since 2004, after his return from New York. Of particular interest are the large-scale mural installation of paintings on Plexiglas (3.15 x 6.30 m), the silkscreen equipment, the Mexican sculptures and masks and the two bookshelves, which we hope you'll enjoy discovering... Watch the interactive video on Matterport

A big thank you to my dear friend Marie-Madeleine Varet, who has followed my work with passion and interest since we met in 2013 and who since then has written about my work in progress with great lightning, deep and curious interest with always her very generous and fraternal thoughts as in a through soul mate relationship. Here, are these 12 small critical texts, which are, for me as an artist, some real gifts, real little jewels, and I hope they can serve as a can-opener and could reveal the deep meanings of my art, so that the public can discover my work in a much more joyful, intimate, global and universal way, than they seem to feel and misunderstand it to this day...

- ABOUT THE FILMED INTERVIEW BETWEEN JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT AND JOHNES RUTA, APRIL 21, 2024
- TEXT FOR "THE FOUR PILLARS OF HEAVEN" EXHIBITION CATALOGUE [2020]
- TEXT ON THE SACRED FOR THE "FOUR PILLARS OF HEAVEN" BROCHURE (2020)
- ABOUT THE "SHAKTI-YONI" SERIES (2018)
- PRESENTATION: EXTRACTS FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS
- THE NOTION OF "INFINITY" IN JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT'S ART WORK
- ABSTRACTION / THEORETICAL MODE / SPIRITUAL MODE: THINKING WHAT WE SEE
- ON THE WORK OF JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT / TRANSVERSALITY
- OF WONDER, OF MOVEMENT, OF TRANS-GRESSION AS PASSAGE, SURPASSING LIMITS
- ABOUT JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT: SOME NOTES (2014)
- MARIE-MADELEINE'S QUESTIONS I COULDN'T OR WOULDN'T ANSWER (MAY 2014)
- ABOUT COMPLEX THINKING IN THE NEW IMAGES ON THE FOLLOWING WEB PAGES (2013)

Interactive 3D documentary film shot in partnership with Agence Vauban de Besançon (Mathieu Allard); camera and shots by Mathis Jacquerot. Discover, as if you were there, the three different rooms of the studio where the artist has been working since 2004, after his return from New York. Of particular interest are the large-scale mural installation of paintings on Plexiglas (3.15 x 6.30 m), the silkscreen equipment, the Mexican sculptures and masks and the two bookshelves, which we hope you'll enjoy discovering... 

JOHNES RUTA: Good morning and good afternoon, it's today April 21st 2024, I'm Johnes Ruta from New Haven, Connecticut, USA. I'm an independent curator, an art theorist and a writer, and I'm here with my long-time dear friend Jean-Pierre Sergent, who I knew from when he lived in Long Island City, in New York, were he stayed until 2003. And I've come here to talk with him and to spend some time and see his work and to learn about what he's working on these days and renew our friendship. So, I would like to ask him some questions about his work and have him, speak, informally as much as possible. So, I have some questions I wanted to ask him about his time in New York, about the years that he spent there. He said from 1993 to 2003. And, how you got there, Jean-Pierre? And about your associations there, with artists and your affinity with the beat generation, with Alexandra David-Néel…

JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT : Oh yes, but she's not part of the beat generation!

JR: Okay, no, but, as a personal mentor… Your inspirations from Allen Ginsberg and his poetry… from, Norman O'Brown's, work Life Against Death, 1959, which was essentially a psychoanalysis of history. And Richard Serra's sculptures and others…. So, please tell me what you like about those things and how you relate to it?

JPS: Well, first of all, Johnes, thank you so much for being here. It's really a great pleasure to welcome you here, in my Besançon studio's... Since we haven't seen each other for more than 20 years. So it's really important for me to exchange with you again. And yesterday, we went to the Courbet Museum and we really had a nice time in the city of Ornans.

JR: Yes, we had a wonderful time!

Interview with my lifelong friend, Johnes Ruta, who came from the USA to visit me and other artist friends in Prague, Vienna and Paris during his trip to Europe in the spring of 2024.
We filmed these interview series on Sunday April 21 2024, and it was very cold in the studio. Johnes, as always, had a lots of interesting questions to ask me....

About Johnes Ruta : "As an arts activist, I consider it my personal mission to develop public understanding of individual creativity, especially toward the appreciation of arts, culture, and the positive evolution of humanity."

Filmed in partnership with Agence Vauban of Besançon, camera: Mathieu Allard & Mathis Jacquerot. Discover as if you were there, the seventy-two paintings on Plexiglas, installed on eight panels, in the magnificent and monumental spaces of the Museum's two staircases. This monumental, eighty-square-meter installation is the largest to date completed by the painter. Exhibited from September 16, 2019 to September 4, 2023.

I glean and collect quotes, aphorisms and little phrases from artists, writers and philosophers that appear on my Twitter Home Page. It's a daily practice when I'm in the studio, in the morning, to look at the news, information and images that I scroll through on this page to take the temperature of the World. It's a bit like what I used to do when I lived in New York, before the advent of computers, buying the big edition of the New York Sunday Times every Sunday and cutting out the images that caught my eye, to screen-print them later on in my paintings. "We must cultivate our garden", said the great Voltaire! So I chose little extracts from texts posted by Internet users, whom I'd like to thank sincerely here; collecting them a bit like someone who lived a long time ago, in a big house with a big garden where I went to pick flowers and vegetables, smell the forest air, listen to the birds singing and feel the presence of wild animals... Please follow the artist's Twitter Home Page.

These new Notes from 2023, like the previous ones, are still written under the aegis of Lucretius's beautiful phrase from his book On Nature: "Like a man, in the midst of a dream, devoured by thirst, and who seeks to drink, and cannot find the water that might quench the fire in his bones...". For I have had a total and unquenchable thirst for Culture, Art, Meaning and Beauty ever since I was a child. In fact, I can still remember, as a child, sitting at a table with the whole family in my great-grandfather Werner's big, beautiful house, making googly eyes at me as I asked his very kind and loving 'maid' Fortunata for a second cream cone, even though I hadn't finished the one I was eating: "Jean-Pierre, your eyes are bigger than your stomach!" Today, I still haven't forgotten that phrase, because it defines me perfectly well and more than any other. But perhaps artists and shamans are exempt, thanks to their ogresco appetite and demiurge-like natures, from this formula of regulating popular wisdom and appetite...

The artist and the anthropologist exchange and discuss on Art, Art History, Contemporary Art, shamanism, violence, sexuality and the various ethnographic influences that deeply inspire the artist's work. Filmed at the Besançon studio on September 1 and 15, 2023, Lionel Georges cameras.

Jean-Pierre Sergent: I would just just like to quote this small extract as an exergue found in a book I'm actually reading, to start our conversation with. It's a book by Robert Byron, titled:
THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLD: FROM RUSSIA TO TIBET, A TRAVELER'S CONFESSION (1930)
"As a member of a community and heir to a culture that are today equally controversial, I wanted to discover ideas - if indeed those of the West were outdated - likely to improve the course of the World and, to this end, also to know, via the language of my own sensibility, the beings and things that constitute THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLD." So there it is, our conversation is off to a good start. And our first idea was to talk about shamanism. Noël, would you like to say a few words about it?

After 4 years of exhibiting his paintings at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon, Franco-New York artist Jean-Pierre Sergent will close this poetic chapter on Sunday, September 3, 2023. So there's little time left for those who haven't yet discovered this artistic universe... 
Article by Eva Bourgin for MaCommune.Info, August 30, 2023.

In partnership with Agence Vauban Besançon, camera: Mathieu Allard & Mathis Jacquerot. Discover as if you were there, the seventy-two paintings on Plexiglas, installed on eight panels, in the magnificent and monumental spaces of the Museum's two staircases. This monumental, eighty-square-meter installation is the largest to date by the Franco-New York painter. On view from September 16, 2019 to September 4, 2023.

Filmed at Claudie Floutier studio-apartment's on June 9, 2023. Cameras: Lionel Georges. Thanks to Millie Floutier & Guillaume Chilemme for helping with transcriptions and Christine Dubois for proofreading.

 PART 1/4: Jean-Pierre Sergent: Hello, everybody, today is June 9, 2023, and I have the great good fortune and honor of interviewing my friend Claudie Floutier, who is an artist and was also my teacher at the Besançon School of Fine Arts. We're here in her studio-apartment, and we're going to show some of the work you've done throughout your career. So, to begin with, you often talk about your childhood with your grandfather. It was in Provence. And you lived a bit like a wild woman, a tomboy, a bit in the wild, picking aromatic and medicinal herbs with him.

Claudie Floutier: With my grandfather!

JPS: Yes, well, if you'd like please, to tell us about your childhood...

Collective exhibition of artists having worked on the subject of the witchcraft...
- INSTITUTIONAL AND PRIVATE LENDERS: Eline Alkhaznawi, Bibliothèque d’étude et de conservation de Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale de Vesoul, Marc-Olivier Bitker Ranson, Anne Valérie Dupont, Claudie Floutier, Barbara Fougnon, Galerie Bugada Cargnel, Mucem, Musée des Augustins de Toulouse, Musée Baron Martin et Muséum de Gray, Musée Charles de Bruyères de Remiremont, Musée-château de Nemours, Musée des beaux-arts de Nancy, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, Musée Félicien Rops de Namur, Musée Georges Garret de Vesoul, Musée Gustave Courbet d'Ornans, Musée Henri Boëz de Maubeuge, Musée du Jouet de Moirans-en-Montagne, Musée Jules Adler de Luxeuil-les-Bains, Musée du Louvre, Marc Paygnard, Jean-Pierre Sergent.

- PART 4/4: Exhibitions "Witches!" Women's spells..., Champlitte Museum, June 30 - October 30, present a few works and also talk about the current status of women: the West, Iran and Afghanistan etc.

- PART 3/4: Her work: mainly small formats on paper? Only with the 3 primary colors? Ref. Charlotte Salomon and the Rosetas. Mention Rembrandt's portraits and the Corona-virées etc...

- PART 2/4: Art and his work as a color teacher at the Besançon School of Fine Arts. Passing on knowledge and information.

- PART 1/4: Growing up with her grandfather Danton in Provence and the Camargue (wild girl, tomboy). 

This new series of filmed interviews: Artists' Worlds, and not Artists' Portraits, as one might have imagined, is devoted to filming discussions with artist friends I've met over the course of my life and artistic career. Because artists are, in fact, Universes in their own right, with their imaginations in creative mode 24 hours a day. Their work is fused with their lives, and they give their all, expecting neither reward nor comfort from their work. They're relentless and wholehearted, and contrary to what happens to them here in France, it seems that in Japan, they're considered Living Treasures! Isn't the grass always greener on the other side of the fence? Unfortunately, this series was started a little late, because when I was in New York in the 1990s and 2000s, I really would have liked to have recorded our long, interminable discussions with my painter friends, in particular Stefan Becker, a German from Munich, and Pierre Louaver, a Frenchman who lived in New York for over thirty years and who both passed away a few years ago...

Series of 42 photos (out of 203) showing the artist silk-screening the images of the new series: "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes". Acrylic hand silk-screened and Indian ink printed on yellow Wang Sketching 80g & Rives B.F.K. white 250g papers, size 80 x 60 cm, unique prints.

These new Notes of 2023, like the previous ones, are still written under the aegis of the very beautiful sentence of Lucretius in his beautiful book On Nature: "Like a man, in the middle of a dream, devoured by thirst, and who seeks to drink, and who does not find the water which could extinguish the fire of his bones... ". Because there is, in me, a total and unquenchable thirst for Culture, Art, Sense and Beauty... and this, since childhood. In fact, I still remember, as a child, sitting with the whole family in the beautiful and large house of my great grandfather Werner, saying to me while making big eyes, while I was already asking his 'maid' Fortunata, very kind and loving, for a second cream cone, while I had not even finished the one I was eating: "Jean-Pierre, you have bigger eyes than big belly!" Today, I still haven't forgotten that phrase because it defines me perfectly and more than any other. But perhaps artists and shamans are exempt, thanks to their ogresque and demiurge natures, from this regulating folk wisdom formula. For they are the ones who are at the maneuvers and put their hands in the cogs, the mechanics and the sludge of all that makes and creates Life and in all that is obviously and fundamentally out of the norms: Nature, Life, Death, the Cosmos and Sex, which are infinite energies on our human temporal scale...

The Notes are small excerpts of thoughts, quotations from authors I have read, testimonies of lived experiences or dreams and initiatory trances that occurred during my artistic and spiritual journey.
NB: The titles of the exhibitions are written in capital letters and the texts found or written in English are presented here in English and sometimes translated below in French.

 - BOOK : Here are 2 quotes from Maurice Maeterlinck in his book : The Treasure of the Humble, which I like very much and make me think about the way the public apprehends, or no longer apprehends Art and my work in particular and it's probably simply for lack of soul! (to read the text written on this subject: ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SOUL TODAY | AFTER "THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLES" BOOK OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK)
"What we know about Ancient Egypt allows us to assume that it went through one of these spiritual periods. At a very remote period in the history of India, the soul must have approached the surface of life to a point which it never reached again; and the remains or memories of its almost immediate presence still produce strange phenomena there today. There are many other moments of the same kind when the spiritual element seems to struggle at the bottom of humanity like a drowning man struggling under the waters of a great river. Remember Persia, for example, Alexandria and the two mystical centuries of the Middle Ages...

I glean and collect quotes, aphorisms and little phrases from artists, writers and philosophers that appear daily on my Twitter Home Page. They are a bit like Ella Maillart's "Bribes de sagesses" who said in her beautiful book: "Europe continues to go wrong. Our civilization based on money is worthless. It is not money that counts, it is the spirit. Money kills the spirit." These are fragments of thoughts, little fireflies illuminating our drifting humanity and warming our hearts, as in this simple sentence uttered by Ichi: "Every being deprived of warmth eventually dies of cold." Excerpted from the film: Ichi, The Samurai Woman by Fumihiko Sori.
NB: This page is mostly written in French, but Twitters found in English are presented in English and translated bellow into French. You can follow the Twitter account of the artist on this page: jpsergentartist

This Pitch-Art video is presenting a miscellaneous selection of medium sized works on paper of the "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes" new series. Mono-prints, acrylic hand silk-screened on white Rives BFK 250g, (56 x 76 cm), printed during Summer and Fall 2022.

This Pitch-Art video is presenting a miscellaneous selection of medium sized works on paper of the "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes" new series. Mono-prints, acrylic hand silk-screened on white Rives BFK 250g, (76 x 56 cm), printed during Summer and Fall 2022.

This Pitch-Art video is presenting a miscellaneous selection of medium sized works on paper of the "Karma-Kali, Sexual Dreams & Paradoxes" new series. Mono-prints, acrylic hand silk-screened on yellow Wang paper 80g (60 x 80 cm), printed during Summer and Fall 2022.