Jean-Claude Desmerges

Untitled Jean-Claude Desmerges Contemporary art drawing african art colour

2024

Jean-Claude Desmerges is a French artist and researcher born in 1957 who combines his skills as a visual artist and researcher in a contextual approach. Holder of a doctorate in art sciences and an associate professor in visual arts, his artistic approach is enriched by travel, poetry, and literature. He expresses himself extensively through painting, drawing, and sculpture. He immerses himself in his subject to convey human and environmental issues, blending visual creation with academic research . His works have been exhibited worldwide in prestigious institutions. My Initiatory Journey in Casamance and my first encounter with Seyni Camara in 2022 : “The story begins at the Women’s Museum in Dakar watching a documentary film about Seyni… a week later I set out in search of her, taking the ferry to Casamance. I initially saw this journey as one of those returns to the roots I have been experiencing for a few years in Africa, starting with Burkina Faso in 2019, searching for secrets to uncover and rituals. For me, traveling, drawing, painting, or sculpting, as well as writing, are all one and the same. But once I arrived in Seyni’s sanctuary, all traces of uncertainty disappeared; I found myself immersed in a primitive hymn. I had the strange feeling of knowing her. There is fire in her gaze. I had left for one day, and after two weeks, I was still there, near her, watching her, drawing her and her works in the making. With her hands, she shapes the clay as if she were ingesting handfuls of mud only to excrete them as tillable earth, into small beings that are half-animal, half-human of another rank, carving and splitting this yellow and purple clay with her thumb; under her fingers, caressing the formless material, with a piercing and shining eye, she captures the essence of light, and I no longer know where or how, but I start drawing on the ground. I surrender to charcoal and clay dust, to a rewriting, attempting to convey the ‘reality’ of my experience without knowing what I am doing on these found cement bags that I hastily tore and peeled apart, which I use as a support. Everything moves quickly. In short gasps, I choose a dynamic stroke, as if I had become a runaway horse whose ultimate goal is to merge with the incantatory signs shaped by Seyni’s hands, the only elementary means for me to reach his inner world. As I draw what I see of Seyni or her sculptures all around, I begin to understand that it is no longer drawing; it is the ‘imaginary’ that I trace in order to create a mental journey, defying all rules to reach something physical, muscular, and spiritual—in a word, fusional. The only way to reach her higher world, to seek further, through the sign, a connection with the world inhabited by the potter of Casamance.