This Kind of Wilderness: Introduction · Lubos Culen

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

textured in the series, displays the exuberance of three-dimensional forms applied over a fire-red field of brushstrokes. Does the title simply imply ‘the first fires’ the humans learned to control in the environment, or is the title an expression of a new direction in the creator’s studio practice?

In the work titled Judges one can notice a dense ordered composition of predominantly vertical white/ bluish brush strokes over the layers of orange and red ground. The title implies impartiality, perhaps trying to find a direction without any preconception of what a new order might entail. In the work Rime the viewer is confronted with an array of black and white swirling ground, which is forcefully intense and perhaps threatening. By contrast, two vertical bars created with the juxtaposition of predominantly red marks stand in contrast with the ground they are positioned on. These two vertical bars were used as an iconography in previous Serfas’ work. Fairly inconclusively, I can only reference the bars as the simulacra of lines on the compass and hence a suggestion of ‘finding the way’ from/to another environment. Similarly, the painting Shake it Out consist of passages of a black and white structure predominantly positioned in the centre of the painting. On the fringes of this structure are passages of colour; this is perhaps a metaphor for the ‘new direction’, whether physical, environmental, or artistic?

The Rest of Us carries almost a metaphysical quality in its exuberance of paint delivery and the Gestalt feeling of the ‘here and now’ state. Yet, despite the solid textures of pigmented polymer structures, there is an openness and light emanating from the centre. The image is at once inclusive and inviting, but also forceful in its bursting transformative state. The hint of the sense of transformation may perhaps be suggested in the painting titled There will be Time. The colour palette intensity is reduced to patterns of white, black and red over the ground of earthy colours. The discontinuity in the gestural paint delivery is a chevron shape on top with hard geometric edges. The reference to time is ambiguous which begs the question; is there an event in the future that Serfas contemplates, or is the ‘here and now’ a transitory state in itself?

Despite the abstract quality of Serfas’ paintings, there are obviously hints of narratives mostly implied in the paintings’ titles which serve as an entry point to invoke possible associations. There is also a diaristic quality in his work, specifically in the works titled Rudy and Choiceland. The first painting references Serfas’ grandfather and his transition from Europe to Canada. The title of the second painting references a small town in Saskatchewan where Serfas spent his formative years. The painting itself references a bird’s-eye-view of the vast fields of cultivated agricultural land. In developing this painting, Serfas used a square-notched trowel to mimic the fields being cultivated by machinery and producing identical rows in the fields. The golden yellow paint highlights the golden shimmer of harvested crops.

Despite the abstract non-representational nature of the paintings in this exhibition, they reflect Serfas’ personal experiences and attitudes. As with all non-representational artwork, there is always a question whether abstraction can generate a narrative. It is clear that we as viewers apprehend any abstract work through our own associations and try to piece together a possible meaning. Serfas provides the entry point in the titles for viewers to examine and consider a modality of interpretations. Often, it is not possible to ‘explain’ an abstract painting within our language structure, but we can contemplate the totality of impact through our associations in a non-verbal realm (Gestalt). Serfas’ paintings are intense and informed by the history of gestural abstraction. Finding his own approach to abstraction, Serfas’ asks whether there is an unknown language, an unexplored territory in abstract painting.

Lubos Culen Curator Vernon Public Art Gallery