By his own description, Jean-Pierre Sergent’s artwork is an exploration of the gap between conscious reality and the aspirations of the subconscious. Free-form images exist in a geometric format, recreating the dynamics and the dichotomy of the psyche. Bold color, explicit subjects, and the precise execution in his work reflect the urgency and passion of ideas and sensations which trace the borders of the limits of matter. – "The erotic image never leaves one indifferent-- it has a role and a function, hence its interest, its violence, and its perversity... It touches directly the intimate of the spectator."

Mr. Sergent, a native of France, came to North America in 1991 and established a studio in Long Island City in 1996. His psychological philosophy, which draws from such sources as Gaston Bachelard’s Poetry of Space and Georges Batailles’ Death and Sensuality (aka Erotism), explores the effects of physical spaces and objects, as well as the individual’s quest for both the primordial uniqueness and that which is personally sacred. Sergent’s atmospheric photographic figure studies -- overtoned by layers of silk screen print -- threshold at the awareness of the "subtle body" perceived as the sexual body itself, suspended within the envelope of an ethereal moment.

Sergent has exhibited his works in Great Britain, France, Canada, and Switzerland and Australia. In early 1998, his work was shown in the gallery of Alliance Francaise, the French Cultural Institute on East 60th at 5th Avenue, New York City. In 1999, his series "Dionysis: The Organs of Life," was featured at Gallery Juno, SoHo, NYC.  More recently, he has also been represented by DFN Gallery and Opera Gallery, in SoHo, NYC.

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 Selk¹man 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 earth¹s 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.

Jean-Pierre Sergent, January 21st 2001
translated by/Anita Anand

Uxmal - New York, a Mayan diary

Uxmal, because from those ghostly ruins there still emanates the magic energy of a whole civilization; New York, because that is where I live, a place that will also become one day, with the perpetual gnawing of time, a faded and forgotten skeleton. This body of paintings was created in a musical, serial, tonal and repetitive style. The main image is one of the Mayan corn-god Wak-Chan-Ahaw. The one who made everything happen, who created the universe, and who fertilized the world. He is dressed, or undressed, by two beautiful naked women, mothers-lovers-goddesses who throughout their gestural offerings bring him back to life, to germination.

This scene from the Mayan mythology takes place on the first day of creation, under water, in the primordial sea, and therefore has a very strong relationship to cosmogonies and the human unconscious. Some images come from contemporary pornography, also featuring its archetypes of phallic resurrections and germinating offerings. Other images are from shamanic drawings, which are spatial representations of the Axis Mundi. The paintings will be presented side by side; the arrangement of the work will be determined by the configuration of the exhibition space. It would be great to have a wall measuring at least 30 feet long, on which I could install seven paintings.

Uxmal, parce que de ces ruines fantomatiques se dégage encore l'énergie magique d¹une civilisation, New York, parce que c'est le lieu où je me situe, lieu qui deviendra lui aussi avec le temps un squelette blanchi et oublié. Cette série de peintures a été créer de manière musicale, sérielle, tonale et répétitive. L¹image principale est une image du dieu Maya du mais Wak-Chan-Ahaw qui recréé l'univers, et fertilise le monde. Il est habillé, où déshabillé par deux déesses nue, et qui dans leur gestes d'offrande, le ressuscitent à la vie. Cette scène de la mythologie Maya se passe sous l'eau, dans la mer primordiale, et a donc un très fort rapport à l'inconscient.
Certaines images sont issue de l¹imagerie pornographique contemporaine reproduisant aussi ses archétypes de résurrections phalliques et d'offrandes germinatoires. D'autres images sont issues de dessins chamaniques, qui sont des représentations spatiales de l'Axis Mundi.
L'ensemble des peintures sera disposé cote à cote de manière linéaire dépendament de l'espace disponible, il serait intéressant d'avoir un mur d'au moins 10 m de long, sur lequel on pourrait installer 7 peintures.

Jean-Pierre Sergent, le 1 Avril 2001