100 ARTISTS OF EUROPE
The Artist's Story
Jean-Pierre Besson, known artistically as Certes, was born in 1958 in Évian-les-Bains, France. A self-taught sculptor, he draws his inspiration directly from the mountains and natural landscapes of the Chablais region. His creative journey began with the discovery of monumental stones in the Pre-Alps, whose shapes already hinted at the essence of contemporary sculpture. Later, his fascination with driftwood led him to combine these two primal elements into a dialogue between strength and fragility, permanence and ephemerality.
Although he started exhibiting late in his career, in 2018 Besson brought his works into the public eye, casting some of them in bronze through the Barthélémy foundry in the Drome. His exhibitions often present a duality of stone and bronze, echoing the interplay between the eternal and the transitory. For him, nature is not only material but also collaborator - an ancient storyteller that whispers histories shaped by water, fire, and time itself.
« You see, with my stones I am never alone. They tell each other stories... stories of time long past. »
Jean-Pierre Besson
ROC DU CHATEAU D'OCHE Jean-Pierre Besson (Certes). 2012 Photography
In this photograph, Certes transforms the alpine landscape into a mirror of human endurance. The summit of the Roc du Château d'Oche rises with an almost vertiginous power, its sharp contours heightened through digital retouching a visual metaphor for struggle and survival.
The foreground, crossed by black vegetal silhouettes, evokes illness and adversity, while the whitened mountain slopes suggest isolation within an immense mineral silence. Yet, beneath this austerity, life breathes: the lake below, subtly reshaped, pulses with a rhythm of persistence and renewal.
By inverting tones and creating a negative flash effect, the artist bridges the visible and the invisible, the external image and the inner experience. The fleeting snow layer becomes a symbol of healing, slowly melting into light, erasing scars and restoring peace.
DANSE SUR LE ROC D'ENFER
Jean-Pierre Besson (Certes). 2018. Sculpture
The artist describes this work an as a hymn to nature, exploration of energies and elemental harmony.
The driftwood, carried by the wind along the shores of Lake Geneva, tells its Ulyssean odyssey and restores through movement its initiatory choreography. The supporting stone found on the mountain "Roc d'Enfer" in the Chablais forms an S-shaped geological knot, the centre of the mountain's folding, and symbolizes the extreme tension that bears the human condition.
The dance of the couple remains aerial despite the earth's gravitational pull. This entwined pair symbolises absolute love transcending and exalting passion and truth. Through this fusion, nature itself approaches contemporary art, forming an eternal artistic loop of creation and transformation.
PAIX Jean-Pierre Besson (Certes) 2016. Sculpture
This sculpture, discovered at the Col d'Ugeon in the Chablais mountain range, embodies both the fragility and the resilience of peace. Resting on a frontier between two friendly nations - France and Switzerland - Paix carries the quiet symbolism of unity and shared destiny. The intricate veins of the stone reveal a turbulent inner structure, like the winding and uncertain path that leads humankind toward peace.
The artist leaves the surface raw, preserving its geological memory a testimony of time's patience and the forces that shaped it. Its natural curvature evokes both a human figure and a contemplative gesture, as if the stone itself were meditating on the meaning of coexistence.
Through this work, Certes invites us to perceive peace not as a static ideal but as a living equilibrium fragile, precious, and ever in motion. The sculpture becomes a silent prayer, a reminder that peace begins not in treaties, but within ourselves.
THE WORLD ART COLLECTION
