ARCHIVE - EXHIBITIONS

• Exhibitions
• Events
• Projects
• Collateral Exhibitions

 

Gems, architecture, reflections

Solo show by Serse at the Galleria Contemporaneo

23 January - 27 February 2010

By holding the first ever solo show of Serse’s work in a public gallery in Venice, galleria Contemporaneo pays tribute to over twenty years of artistic research by one of the most interesting practitioners in Italy today. The artist, who has made his home in Trieste, concentrates exclusively on graphite drawing. Over the years he has produced an extraordinary series of images which have led to his inclusion in the book Drawing published by Phaidon Press, as well as his inclusion in numerous, high-level international exhibitions. His work is distinguished by a coherence and recognisability which make him unique in the Italian art scene.

He does not use drawing, as has often been the case, as the classical tool for the development of the invisible framework of a painting, nor does he use it- as many contemporary artist do- to represent a precarious and fragile visual statement. In Serse’s approach the absolute completeness of the work is due solely to drawing, to the “no more than this” which drawing represents- it is a tool that undergoes a vertiginous analysis which probes all its possibilities. One of the most intense re-readings of the subject of landscape in contemporary art has poured out of Serse’s graphite: seas, cloud filled skies, towering mountains, snowy forests

That is, the sublime, non-human dimension of the earth in its elementary condition of first and last things. It is as if it were possible to use the material and physical nature of graphite to probe the mineral soul of the world, where transformations occur on a time scale which is not human. In recent years Serse has further deepened that which can be included in, or at least referred back to the graphite which has been a constant in his career. His work Riflessi offers a richly detailed description of the changing and unstable character of the surface of water, almost bordering on abstraction. The reference to the mineral nature of graphite is also translated in the astonishing series of Diamanti (diamonds), where the perfect and inalterable form reminds us of the crystallographic origins of the primary forms of geometry and construction.
It is therefore no coincidence that the artist has decided to address architecture itself, that is to say the perfection of that what is constructed which evokes the sense of a different perfection. The works which Serse has dedicated to the architecture of Carlo Scarpa, in particular the Tomb of Brion, works which will be seen for the first time ever at the Galleria Contemporaneo, are amongst the most intense re-interpretations of the works of the great architect.

 

 

Download Pdf (388 Kb)