TWO ARTISTS EXHIBITION > "BIRDS & LANDSCAPES" EILBHE DONOVAN (IRELAND) & JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT (FRANCE)
GALLERY KELLER, 7 Proudhon Street, 25000 Besançon, France
19 September 2025 - 14 October 2025
Vernissage:
Friday, September 19th from 6 to 8 pm
Saturday, September 20th, 3 to 7 pm.
Come and discover the famous absinthe from the Distillerie du Saut du Doubs, distilled by Matisse Droz!
Opening hours:
2 to 7 pm, Wednesday to Saturday and by appointment. In general, the artist JPS will be present at the gallery every Saturday afternoons from 3 pm to 6 pm.
About this Exhibition
This new exhibition, “BIRDS & LANDSCAPES,” will be held at the new Keller Gallery located now in Besançon and will mainly feature numerous works on paper (ink and pencil) by Irish artist Eilbhe Donovan, who will be traveling from Ireland especially for the opening of the show, as well as a few small works by Jean-Pierre Sergent that relate to the themes of her works: birds and landscapes...
This exhibition will take place simultaneously with the well renowned 78th Besançon International Music Festival (September 12–27, 2025)
– Eilbhe Donovan (born in Ireland in 1973)
– Biography
Having obtained an Honours degree in illustration at West Wales School of the Arts, Eilbhe Donovan’s work derives from the traditional illustration techniques of drawing and printmaking. Her time in South East Asia is evident in the Japanese inIluenced style of minimalist ink painting, particularly the simplistic highly stylised movement of Shin-Hanga where there is little to no background, rather a faint suggestion.
Paintings are created using traditional Oriental brushes loaded with water and ink applied thereafter with a pipette. This creates a light airiness as the ink disappears into itself in a random manner. These are worked up in pencil & ink afterward.
Eilbhe has exhibited widely internationally and her work is held in private collections in Australia, USA, UK, Germany, Switzerland and Ireland.
– Artist Statement
I live within walking distance of the Atlantic ocean. I am interested in the relationship between humans and the sea. The ocean world fascinates me and I see the coast as the meeting point of the known world and the unknown. We aspire to live beside it, yet cannot control it. It is both temptress and Iickle traitor; provider and destroyer.
It can bring the greatest calm as well as the utmost destruction.
I try to capture that. There is a sadness too in the knowledge that we are destroying our own bounty. This relationship is edging ever closer to a tipping point. It is delicate.
Many of the images are created from blended memories of trips by sea kayak to remote Atlantic islands and isolated coves. They are an attempt to capture a moment in time, a split second, the briefest glimpse. I do not wish to intrude.
I wish to observe yet be unobserved.
– Her exhibited artwork
- “Stealth”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 91 x 116 cm, 2024
- “Leap of Faith”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 70 x 90 cm, 2021
- “Gracile”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 92 x 112 cm, 2024
- “Fracture”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 80 x 78 cm, 2025
- “Fallow”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 56 x 56 cm, 2024
- “Lassitude”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 41 x 41 cm, 2025
- “The Formation of Castles in the Air”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 41 x 41 cm, 2025
- “Budding”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 41 x 41 cm, 2025
- “Windswept”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 41 x 41 cm, 2024
- “Mire”, Ink & pencil on cotton paper, 41 x 41 cm, 2025
– Jean-Pierre Sergernt (born in 1958 in Morteau, France)
– Biography
French-New-York painter (1993-2003), now living and working in Besançon. His serigraphic works of paint on Plexiglas and paper have been exhibited internationally since the 90s: in Canada, the United States, Europe, Iran and China since 2016.
His work is both a marvel at life and its transience, and a vibrant tribute to the colossal energy of life in its human-cultural continuity and timeless cosmic infinity: a gushing presence of erotic desire from the mists of time and cosmic-mystical beauty.
– ABOUT THE PAINTING “MAYAN DIARY #95”: LIFE, BUTTERFLIES, ORGANIZED CHAOS, ART, SPIRITUALITY, CULTURES AND THE RIGHT COLORS
It was essential and vital for us human beings, for hundreds of millennia, to organize, imagine and plan our Worlds geographically, spiritually, politically and 'cosmically'. As in this Aztec calendar, with its months of the Rabbit, the Eagle, the Jaguar, Death, Rain etc... With the plenipotentiary priest, at its center, in the Axis Mundi to be exact, performing rituals to regenerate and redistribute the order of Life and Time by invoking the forces of lightning, bodies, blood and sun in a vortex of butterflies!
All the great ancient civilizations or human organizations, tribes, families etc. had organized, built, defined and established, to live together from birth to death: places, temples, rivers, trees or even stones, dedicated to their rituals of passage where they could gather together, in order to communicate with what we nowadays call, by convention and also a little mockingly, we must admit, the Spirits, the Gods, the Beyond, the Other Worlds or the Kamis (the spirit of things and beings in Japanese)....
Today, however, most of these places have been desacralized, and all that remains of them are ruins, scraps, residual fragments, crumbs, a few traces... left bare and forgotten, here and there, by the sad and devastating advance of the great history of industrialization and desacralization of the World. Yet these places still welcome myriads of fervent and stupid tourists, the indecorably 'smartphoned' humans... reminiscent, no doubt, of Worlds and practices that humanity once knew, long ago already...
Because the links with the Earth, the Sun, the Animals, the Stars, the marvellous universes and the tutti quanti, are no longer made or created, nor do they help anyone, any human being, to access another level, this higher, transcendent spiritual level.
However, certain links can still be felt, sometimes, in the Arts, such privileged spaces, because Art remains today, it seems to me, at least for me, one of the only places, the last place and the last refuge perhaps, of a reflective surface, a mirror where man can still find a way, a way of remaining humbly and desperately Human, and where, perhaps one last time, we can rediscover this full and complete dimension, charged with spiritual energy through the experience of Life, Death, the body, orgasm, invigorating colors and mystical ecstasies? Let's hope so, despite all our despair!
Jean-Pierre Sergent, Besançon, June 7, 2025
– ABOUT THE SERIES: “DESIRE, WOMBS, CAVES & WHITE LOTUS” (2011-2014)
This series was begun in the spring of 2014 at the Besançon studio. Its title was inspired by the artist's careful and curious reading of the large book of the Upanishads, because in this very ancient book, dating back more than three thousand years and founding Hindu thought, which reconciles the self with the universal soul, it often refers to the way humans view reality and their creations (the maya, the world of illusions) and the emotion, poetry, desire, metaphors, and metamorphosis that they evoke in our deepest selves as human beings:
“Desire, the matrix, the time of desire—He who wields thunder, Indra, the cave, Ha Sa, the wind, the cloud, the king of the heavens—And again the cave, Sa Ka La, and illusion: Such is the primordial wisdom that embraces us, Mother of the immense universe.”
– HIS EXHIBITED ARTWORKS:
- 1, “Mayan Diary #72,” 2011, screen-printed acrylic paint and acrylic paint on the back of Plexiglas plates, framed: 1.40 x 1.40 m
- 2, “Half Paper,” 2011, monoprint, hand-silkscreened acrylic on white Rives B.F.K paper, 280g, 61 x 107 cm
- 3-8, “Desire, Wombs, Caves & White Lotus,” 2011-2012, acrylic hand silk-screened on white Rives BFK paper 250g, one of a kind print or edition of 1/5, 43 x 42.5 cm
Contacts
Galerie Keller
Heidi Suter
galeriekeller.com
hs.kellergalerie@gmail.com
Phone +33 (0)9 56 76 45 54
WhatsApp +41(0)79 329 58 56
Jean-Pierre Sergent:
contact@j-psergent.com
+33 (0)6 73 44 94 86
j-psergent.com
Eilbhe Donovan
eilbhedonovan@gmail.com
www.eilbhedonovan.com
Galerie Keller:
7 Rue Proudhon
25000 Besançon
France