Jean-Claude Desmerges

Jean-Claude Desmerges (b. 1957) is a French artist and researcher. He brings together his dual practice as a visual artist and academic researcher through a deeply contextual and immersive approach.

Holding a PhD in Art Sciences and an agrégation in Visual Arts, Desmerges enriches his artistic language through travel, poetry, and literature. His work unfolds across painting, drawing, and sculpture, forming a body of practice where visual creation and intellectual inquiry continuously inform one another.

Immersing himself fully in his subjects, Desmerges seeks to convey human and environmental concerns by merging artistic creation with academic research. His scholarly collaborations include publications with Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), L’Harmattan, and the Laboratoire CAMELIA (France). His work has been exhibited internationally in prestigious venues, including Galerie Antoine Candau (Paris), Galerie Claire Corcia (Paris), Galerie Fac Simile (Milan), as well as the Venice Biennale and the Dakar Biennale.

“My journey began like an intrigue unfolding at the Museum of Women in Dakar, on the first floor, while watching a documentary film about Seyni. One week later, I set out in search of her, boarding the ferry to Casamance.

At first, I saw this journey as another return to origins—similar to those I had undertaken in Africa since 2019, beginning in Burkina Faso—in search of secrets and rituals. For me, traveling, drawing, painting, sculpting, and writing are inseparable acts.

But once inside Seyni’s sanctuary, all uncertainty vanished. I found myself immersed in a primordial hymn. I had the strange sensation of already knowing her, of having heard her before. There was fire in her gaze.

I had planned to stay one day. Two weeks later, I was still there—beside her—observing, drawing her and her works as they came into being. With her hands, she shapes clay as if ingesting handfuls of mud, transforming them into fertile earth, into small beings—half-animal, half-human—belonging to another realm. She cuts and splits the yellow and purple clay with her thumb; beneath her caressing fingers, the formless matter comes alive. Her sharp, luminous eyes grasp the meaning of light.

And somewhere in that moment, I found myself drawing on the ground. I surrendered to charcoal and clay dust, attempting to rewrite the ‘reality’ of my experience without fully knowing what I was doing. I tore apart found cement bags to use as supports. Everything happened quickly.

In short breaths, I chose a dynamic line, as if I had become an unbridled horse whose only aim was to merge with the incantatory signs shaped by Seyni’s hands—the only elemental means, for me, of reaching her inner world.

As I drew Seyni and her sculptures surrounding us, I began to understand that this was no longer drawing. I was tracing the imaginary, creating a mental itinerary—defying rules to reach something physical, muscular, spiritual. In a word: fusion.

Through the sign, through the gesture, I sought connection with the world inhabited by the potter of Casamance. I traced a path of life, convinced that I was writing the narrative of an initiatory journey—one that would lead me, over the next four years, again and again to the edge of the unknown.

The works presented at Galerie Claire Corcia are the traces of these new reminiscences—like correspondences or synesthetic echoes between the senses and perceptions experienced in her studio.”