Concentrating exclusively graphite drawing, working in his adoptive city of Trieste, Serse has produced a remarkable series of images over the years, which has led to his inclusion in the volume Drawing published by Phaidon Press, and participation in important international events. His work stands out for its consistency and recognizable image, making him a unique figure on today’s national scene. Drawing, in his case, is not the classic tool for the development of the invisible underpinnings of a painting, nor does he use the technique as do many other contemporary artists, as a precarious, fragile form of visual note taking. In Serse, it is the work, its absolute fulfillment, that comes from drawing alone, from the “nothing more than this” that the drawing represents: a tool subjected to dizzying analysis, exploring all its potential uses.

Serse’s graphite unleashes one of the most intense reinterpretations of the theme of the landscape in contemporary art: seas, cloudy skies, very high mountains, snow-clad woods. In other words, the non-human, sublime dimension of the earth in its primal condition, of first and last things. As if it were possible to probe, through the concrete materiality of graphite, the mineral soul of the earth, whose transformations happen over a time scale that is not anthropological in nature.

In recent years Serse has delved deeper into what could be included, or in any case conveyed, in that graphite that has set his career apart. The reference to the mineral condition of the graphite translates into the astonishing series of the Diamonds, whose perfect, inalterable form takes us back to the crystallographic origins of the basic forms of geometry and construction. So it is no coincidence that the artist has decided to also come to terms with architecture itself, that is with the “crystallographic” perfection of construction. The works Serse devotes to the output of Carlo Scarpa, especially the complex of San Vito di Altivole, are among the most subtle reinterpretations of the great architect. The title with which Serse presents these works in the spaces of Galleria Giuseppe Pero links back to a reflection on artistic activity that effectively took concrete form in an intervention inside another work of architecture by Scarpa. This is the Revoltella Museum in Trieste, reopened after a long period of closure and then restoration, in 1990. On that occasion, among the contemporary works selected to reinterpret the concept of neoclassicism, there was also a wall piece by Gerhard Merz.

A large inscription (still seen at the entrance to the museum) conceived by the German artist as a sort of tribute to the art of building and to Carlo Scarpa, whose project formed the basis for the functional renovation of the institution in Trieste. Gerhard Merz used a passage of the Eupalinos by Paul Valery, where Phaedrus, conversing with Socrates, recalls how he came to know Eupalinos, the builder of the temple and a native of Megara. No trace of his deep nocturnal meditations remained in the discussions of the workmen, since he expressed himself in terms of “orders and numbers.” “It is the same way God speaks,” Socrates comments.

In Serse’s interpretation, the term “order” does not so literally refer to the way an architect might express himself on a worksite, but to that inner agreement between the parts that establishes the cohesion of the materials and the conception of a work of architecture. Orders and numbers, i.e. the sense of measure and measuring (in the work of Carlo Scarpa at San Vito there is, effectively, a measure that returns as a compositional module) and their relationship with the concept of drawing itself. Thus we are brought back to Serse’s reflection on his medium, that of graphite drawing: a material that by its nature reminds us of that mineral dimension (graphite and diamonds are allotropic forms of carbon), of a not-only-human geometry of the constructed world. A dimension that emerges in the extraordinary funerary work dedicated to the Brion family, which the series of drawings by Serse portrays in all its facets, including the impact of a very rare contemporary project in his city.

Text by Riccardo Caldura

Giuseppe Pero Gallery
Via Porro Lambertenghi, 3T
Milan 20159 Italy
Ph. +39 02 66823916

Opening hours
Monday - Friday from 2pm to 7pm
Saturday by appointment