Shawn Serfas: In Search of Choiceland by Derek J. J. Knight Shawn Serfas has perfected an abstract process in his vibrant canvases that is largely experimental, processoriented and always inventive. His buildup of surface tension –puddled, rolled or spackled pigment, large controlled brush strokes, and blocks or lozenges of colour and underpainting, are characteristic of what I wish to describe as a ‘maximalist painterly sensibility.’ If we can point to the gestural paintings of the American vanguard of the post-War era, or members of the Regina Five in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, Serfas is a member today of a generation of Canadian artists that includes painters such as John Kissick, Sandra Meigs and Matt Crookshank who have embraced a tactility and experimental posture in their fearless and deft orchestration of their materials. Serfas, is unique and resolute about his trajectory, which has examined most imaginable genres of gestural abstraction, with the exception of the geometries of hard edge or conceptual painting, trends that were the subject of an exhibition curated in 2017-18 by the Vancouver Art Gallery.1 Rather, with Serfas there is always the drama of a robust action in which the paint flows freely, puddles or races to the point of least resistance as the canvas is lifted and manipulated to help establish a fluid colour field that is the basis on which he can then rework the surface with brushes, rollers, trowels, brooms or rakes. In preferring the more performative, chance-oriented actions of gestures, his protracted execution over the period of weeks allows for the accretion and build-up of paint, which can then be sanded down or polished to render a fixed or layered surface. Serfas produces canvases that are physically commanding in their life-size scale but they also harbour important themes that allude to the painter’s belief system, most notably the experience and emotional hold the physical environment exerts on him. There is a longstanding relationship with the Western Canadian and Prairie landscapes, which translates into dramatic, forceful and sometimes ethereal evocations of weathered, horizonless fugues, kaleidoscopic geographies or even lamentations of deeply seeded memories of places and people. These are the leitmotifs of This Kind of Wilderness, a title that asks us to consider how these nine paintings and a single sculpture register beyond their often intense form-making and convey something of the introspective, indeed palpable and illusive world of metaphor. Within the context of This Kind of Wilderness where two thirds of the nine canvases show bold calligraphic strokes, tiled markings made with a broad brush around a centrist often ephemeral image, Choiceland (2021) and Rudy (2021) are more telling in their titles. In Choiceland the yellow-wheat coloured surface is tinged with the loam of the earth in its browns, ochres and oranges. The underpainting is revealed more intensely on the four edges of the canvas, which reinforces the floating apparition of a field of wheat or canola perhaps rippled by the wind. Choiceland is a small town in Saskatchewan, which is cradled between the Torch and North Saskatchewan Rivers and the northern boreal forest.2 In essence it is the artist’s paean to a part of the prairie that has been farmed and has sustained a way of life for settler society since the mid19th century.3
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