Artist Statement · Shawn Serfas

artist statement

The foundation of my art practice and creative research explores the relationships between environmental sciences, the landscape and issues bordering abstraction and representation. Within that framework I pose questions concerning identity, place, ancestral origin, religion, and relational abstraction.

As a painter I believe that content is negotiated through process and my studio practice is experimental and process driven. I am interested in the physicality or, what I term the geomorphology of paint and how it becomes a surrogate for other forms of matter and their respective meanings. This view filters my creative research through a systematic lens relating to observational experiments assessing the physical and chemical properties of marks I make in relation to a pluralistic range of concepts. Importantly, my interest in geomorphology is aided by my understanding of hydrology and remote imaging. These have influenced an order of physical governance in my painting practice that reveals a topographical or aerial perspective using geological references and employing specific painting techniques that mimic environmental forces. Relational Abstraction is a proposition, which asserts that nature is the genetic source of all abstractions in art. If the centrifugal withdrawal or separation of an idea or matter from its parent group is the definition of objective abstraction, then relational abstraction is a centripetal or constant force. In reinforcing the constant action of abstraction, it is not an empty, subjective formal vessel; for it is here the line between abstraction and representation is blurred. This is the crux of my philosophical approach to painting. Chaos theory and anti-aesthetic theory also influence the decisions formed in my studio practice. Geometry and architecture dominate the figurative language in my painting, while perceived levels of chaos establish the field which I chart. Specifically, it is the notion of the repeated pattern and self-similarity of visual information throughout micro and macro scales that informs my practice. The elusive presence of beauty and the search for purpose or structure within painting invite an anti-aesthetic discourse. I am interested in questioning my own perspective of beauty, examining the acquired tenets governed by taste in art, while critically examining the purpose and role of formulating my own discrete visual language. My creative practice is directly linked to my surroundings and daily observations of physical space. I am interested in the marks that humans have made upon the landscape, and especially how these manifest and influence natural spaces. This contrast is paralleled in the choices I make with figure/

ground, geometric/organic or order/chaos relationships within painting and my ideas of describing space. The analyses of indirect painting processes and the accumulation or layering of complex visual language over composite or empirical visual information regularly inform my research. I believe that the process of painting is much like studying the origin of landforms or the environmental influences upon landscapes; it is an observational exercise in acquiring data, forming a proposition, and testing those ideas. The main question always under inquiry is, what makes a painting a painting? A secondary question always present in my work examines the objecthood of painting relative to conventions of pictorial illusions and how this relationship imitates everyday experiences concerning object-illusions. I create pictures of foreign, remote, unknown, and immaterial terrains, both atmospheric and subterranean in nature. The descriptive images I create portray the forces that shape both ideas and matter; they are invented, sourced and auto fictional.

Shawn Serfas, 2021