Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present THE DOOM OF BEAUTY, Andres Serrano's first-ever exhibition of paintings. Borrowing its title from a poem by Michelangelo, it is the artist's sixth solo show at the gallery.
Born in 1950 in New York, Andres Serrano has been developing, over the past thirty years, a body of work that relates to the Spirit of the Times - translated from the German Zeitgeist, a philosophical term referring to the intellectual, moral and cultural context of a certain era. His work as an artist demands that we look - that we look straight in the eyes¹ - at the spirit of our times: its abuses, its disruptions and its violence, concealed in our contemporary societies. While, at first glance, Andres Serrano's work bewilders the viewer with its power of representation, it must also be seen through the prism of the artist's fascination with certain old masters. References to the history of art, both in terms of painting and sculpture, run through his entire oeuvre. By "updating" certain classical artworks, Andres Serrano brings them back to life: the framing is original, the colorimetry resolutely personal, and each composition is meticulously reworked by the contemporary artist. In his own words, the point is to prove that "what happens in the past does not always stay in the past."
While religious iconography is a leitmotif in his work, the THE DOOM OF BEAUTY exhibition presents a group of works that are completely new to Andres Serrano's artistic repertoire. Large-scale, black and white photographic prints of sculptures by Michelangelo (1475-1564) - along with other Greek and Roman sculptures - have been reworked with color. For this new series, the artist replaces the camera - his preferred medium - with pastels, pencils and acrylic paint. For the first time since studying painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Andres Serrano has returned to the practice of painting. It was last year, while leafing through a catalogue on the Italian Renaissance sculptor, that he began drawing on the book's photographs with no particular intention. "The drawings," he says, "were very spontaneous, almost unconscious. It was a way of liberating myself from a self-imposed exile whereby I made art not with my own hands but with a camera."
In this way, the colorful strokes follow the agile outlines of each sculpture, sometimes drifting away from them, in some cases following the natural path of paint as it drips downwards, under the effect of gravity. These combinations of lines and colors create a play on rhythm, matter and contrasts. Here, the act of painting introduces light into the image and frees it from its simple historical or religious function.
Andres Serrano is particularly fond of Michelangelo's Pietá. This sculpture, which physically stands at the entrance to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, embodies the miracle of supreme skill: the marble is pure, polished and gleaming; the drapery is divine. In these beautiful things, there is also the appearance of the dead Christ, his whole body stretched out on the Virgin Mary's lap. The beauty of the body emerges from the stone, an artificial nude that seems so real to us. Three interpretations of the sculpture, titled Emerald Pieta, Orange Pieta and Cadmium Red Pieta unfold before our eyes, distinguished from each other by their color. Here, Christ adheres simultaneously to the realms of sculpture, photography and painting, offering spectators the art of metamorphosis: while stone is transformed into an imitation of reality, photography simulates the weight of the sculpted cloth. Painting, meanwhile, embodies the divine breath, giving life to the subjects in the image, the color red trickling like blood.
Thus, while celebrating a new aspect of Andres Serrano's artistic activity, these works inscribe themselves in the continuity of his artistic practice: each stone statue comes to life under its colored outlines, similarly to the art of portraiture, which has been dear to the artist for a long time. In the gallery space, the portraits surge from the past and are hung at visitors' eyelevel: a co-presence that invites reflection on the place of the sacred - from religious worship to the sacralization of an artwork - in our contemporary societies. More than a mirror of today's world, THE DOOM OF BEAUTY exhibition both questions and disturbs, that is, ultimately, the purpose of art. Andres Serrano states "My works does not reflect today's world, it reflects my world and for an artist, that's all that maters."
¹ ARASSE Daniel, Les Transis, 1992
