Portrait de Seyni Camara, 2024

Jean-Claude Desmerges  

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.

Holding a doctorate in art history and an associate professor of visual arts, his artistic approach is enriched by travel, poetry, and literature. He expresses himself extensively through painting, drawing, and sculpture.

Jean-Claude Desmerges immerses himself in his subject matter to convey the human and environmental challenges, blending visual creation with academic research (PUF, l'Harmattan, CAMELIA Laboratory, France). His works have been exhibited worldwide in prestigious institutions (Galerie Antoine Candau, Paris, Galerie Fac Simile, Milan, Venice and Dakar Biennales, etc.).

My initiatory journey to Casamance and my first encounter with Seyni,

one day in July 2022

“At first, it seemed like a story that began at the Women's Museum in Dakar, on the first floor, with a documentary about Seyni entitled… A week later, I set off in search of her, taking the ferry to Casamance. Not quite knowing what to expect, I initially saw this journey as one of those returns to my roots that I've been experiencing for several years now in Africa, since Burkina Faso in 2019, in search of secrets to uncover and rituals to discover. For me, traveling and drawing, painting or sculpting, but also writing, are all one. But once I arrived in Seyni's lair, all trace of uncertainty vanished; I found myself immersed in a primal hymn. I had the strange feeling of knowing her, of having heard her. There was fire in her eyes." I had left for a day, and two weeks later, I was still there, near her, watching her, sketching her and her works in progress. With her hands, she molds the clay as if she were swallowing handfuls of mud to bring them forth as arable earth, as small, half-animal, half-human beings of another order, carving and splitting this yellow and purple clay with her thumb; beneath her fingers caressing the formless material, her eye piercing and shining, she grasps the meaning of light, and I, I no longer know where or how, but I begin to draw on the ground. I surrender to the charcoal and clay dust, to a rewriting, trying to convey the "reality" of my experience without knowing what I'm doing on these found cement bags that I've torn open and stripped of their contents in a hurry, which serve as my support. Everything happens very quickly. In a short burst of breath, I opt for a dynamic line, as if I had become a runaway horse whose ultimate goal is to merge with the incantatory signs shaped by Seyni's hands, for me the only elemental means of reaching her 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 "imagination" that I am tracing to create a mental journey, defying all rules to arrive at something physical, muscular, and spiritual—in a word, a fusion. The only way to reach her higher world, to seek further, through the sign, the connection with the world populated by the potter of Casamance, I trace a path of life, convinced that I am writing an initiatory travelogue that will lead me for four years, always and each time, to the edge of the unknown. What I am presenting at the Claire Corcia gallery are traces of new reminiscences, like correspondences or synesthesias between the senses and perceptions experienced in her studio. – Jean-Claude Desmerges