CURRENT EXHIBITIONS Vernon Public Art Gallery 2008 |
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IntroductionIntroduction The exhibition Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial is a body of abstract paintings inspired by the artist’s intimate experience of landscape combined with an intellectual probing and understanding of the immediate and distant environment. Despite the fact that his images allude to the Earth’s surface seen from a remote vantage point above, the references to time passage, place and scale in his work are abstracted. Images in the exhibition convey the sense of literal and metaphorical environmental associations. They were developed through a symbolic documentation reflecting human awareness of the environment. In addition to the portrayal of the material environments, Serfas builds in additional layers of significance with personal, historic, ancestral and ontological consequences. The exhibition as a whole serves as a physical, emotional, intuitive and intellectual abstract topographical survey. Serfas identifies himself primarily as a ‘landscape painter’ influenced by the concept of ‘relational abstraction’ often referred to as ‘associative abstraction’. This approach to art-making is concerned with the extraction of the experiential nature of both material and subliminal environments. Here, an interesting dichotomy arises: the modality of the concept based on the associative ‘understanding’ of abstract pictorial propositions allows the viewers to find the references to some sort of physical environment created through a process of erosion, sedimentation, and entropy observed from a bird’s-eye-view. This fact extends the ‘reading’ of abstract images past their abstract or nonobjective representational forms. It introduces a possibility of their interpretation linked to the artwork’s associative qualities through which we as viewers interpret it. This interpretation is parallel to the viewer’s actual experiences of the physical environment. In the process of constructing images, Serfas links himself with contemporary artists whose work is preoccupied with physical environments on both micro and macro levels. His mode of operation relies on a repeated application of the painting media that results in a substantial physical build-up which reflects an easily imagined material environment. From this point of view, Serfas’ images quite successfully express his desire to capture the essence of his preoccupation with the environment.
While there are heavily structured layers in the paintings that convey a sense of erosion, sedimentation and fluidity, Serfas also builds in geometrical elements – sometimes juxtaposed, other times embedded deeply within the layers of paint. Despite the fact that these archetypal elements may be quite basic and simple in their appearance, for instance circles or a vertical monolithical bar, their prominence in scale and placement suggests additional implied meaning. In the analysis of these easily recognizable archetypal shapes, one starts to ‘read’ additional significance built into the images. Carolyn MacHardy’s essay in this publication and the following discussion with the artist expose the fact that the images function semiotically on many levels. The references to ‘landscape’ or ‘Earth’s surface’, and the density of reading inevitably link the images with humanity’s history of the changing physical environments we inhabit. This sense of history, environmental awareness and a desire to interpret the ‘immaterial’ is captured in believable pictorial propositions that often carry ontological undertones. Serfas’ interests, direction of inquiry, and his pluralism of ideas firmly situate his artistic practice in a contemporary discourse. Lubos Culen |
