Shawn Serfas: This Kind of Wilderness
The works presented in this exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery illustrates the dedication of Shawn Serfas to finding new languages and processes while addressing questions about abstraction. The work communicates different concepts and approaches in the history of abstract paintings. The large-scale paintings and gestural delivery might reference the approaches married to Abstract Expressionism, yet Serfas’ delivery is more controlled while allowing for ‘the concept of chance and accidents’ to occur. His approach to painting is experimental and process oriented and all his work up to date has placed great emphasis on the materiality and the tactility of his paintings’ surfaces. While Serfas’ work is often based on landscape forms observed from high vantage points (the concept of which was the subject of his exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery in 2008), the references to passage of time and space are abstracted. It is inevitable to note that for Serfas different sites, locations and environments are visual thematic underpinnings transposed to the surface of his canvases. As he points out, the paintings reflect, in an abstract manner, the beauty of the environment together with the anti-aesthetic signs of human activity on the environment. In the exhibition titled This Kind of Wilderness, Serfas pushes the edges of abstraction by asking the question whether there is an unknown language in painting to yet be discovered. The surfaces of his paintings are textured and hence they speak of the materiality of paint, but Serfas added additional 3D elements built from pigmented polymer resin. The viewer is faced with the paradox of viewing 3D structures built on presumptively two-dimensional surfaces. The final element in the exhibition is a sculptural object (28 x 9 x 9 in) built on a three-dimensional canvas with a buildup of pigmented polymer on canvas. This object is a paradoxical element which is perceived as a sculptural element, but built by the means of applying pigmented polymer - paint - on canvas. This object/painting has a complete autonomy within the context of this exhibition of paintings and one has to ask the question whether this object is a logical extension of Serfas’ search for the new language of abstraction. Its title, Abrade, is somehow ambiguous as its meaning implies something scraped or eroded, as opposed to something created by focused effort. Despite some concerns about the propensity of abstract art to imply narratives, Serfas titles his paintings tied to the connotation with his own experiences and how he perceives life, world, culture, history and art. Even if the titles do not exactly reveal clearly the significance of some parallel narrative, they are often linked to some universal metanarratives. The title Chariot might simply imply conveyance or travel, but in the abstract sense it implies movement, race, or procession. The painting First Fires, perhaps the most
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