René Serrano Rodriguez Blog

M20241217 Mixed media Canvas 200 X 140 centimeters (78 X 55 Inches) 2024 In an era when artificial intelligence generates representations of our most uninhibited “prompts” at unimaginable speeds, I present this series of paintings, which—without my realizing it at the time—I had already begun in 1998. That year, I produced a portrait of my school friend Marie as part of an analog photography laboratory course. This image now serves as the point of departure for a new body of work, reconfigured into painterly compositions and interwoven with figures, hairstyles, clothing, and other motifs drawn from diverse art-historical movements. Copied again and again, the facial features drawn from the same photographic source inevitably change with each human “print.” Through this process, the work pays homage to the academy as an institution, while simultaneously integrating elements from my own personal history. The academic tradition and the autobiographical narrative intersect, generating a sp...

Villers-La-Ville  Villers-la-Ville is an abbey constructed in 1146 in the Walloon region of Belgium. Abandoned in 1796, this former abbey of Cistercian monks has served as the backdrop for various events and has become a tourist attraction in the Belgian kingdom since then. (Yes, it is the setting you observed in the Sense8 series.) Notably, Victor Hugo visited it three times! I had the opportunity to explore this abbey in 2002 and returned later to make some sketches of the tombstones that were present. As a devoted enthusiast of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, I couldn't pass up the chance to observe them on the ground. (Certainly, I did not take anything, and the sketches I made did not impact the surface of the tombstones.) I created the following series with the concept of envisioning a meeting between two beings who traverse a segment of a journey within a series of routes, only to eventually diverge onto different and unique paths. The photographs presented here were cap...

Aujourd'hui, j'ai eu une excellente conversation d'anniversaire avec mon mentor et grand ami, Christian Rolet. (Voici une photo datant déjà d'un an.) À Rolet : Le sage Maître marchera maintes fois dans mon esprit ; il s'installera comme ce premier jour où il m'a accueilli dans cet atelier à Tournai ; la deuxième ville et famille de ma vie... Je dis "deuxième" pas par ordre d'importance mais plutôt par la signification du temps ; le temps où je suis né à nouveau là-bas. Je n'ai pas seulement appris à "faire" de l'art dans cet atelier ; j'ai appris que l'art devait être VÉCU, que c'était la responsabilité de chacun de nous, en tant qu'étudiants, d'affronter notre décision de croire en notre choix de raconter de nouvelles histoires pour le pureté de notre sincère plaisir. Rolet m'a adopté ; l'être humain derrière les pigments s'est même inquiété de m'emmener à l'aéroport, de m'aider à ch...