René Serrano Rodriguez Blog

” Self- Portrait at the Academy of Fine Arts" # SP2026199801 Mixed media  W39 X H58 X Z27 Cm (W15 X H23 X Z11 In)  2026 This series of self-portraits is, in part, a tribute to my alma mater and, more broadly, to artistic education. I believe that the practice of painting fully allows for a self-taught path; however, in my case, walking the corridors of the Fine Arts schools was profoundly important, as was the good fortune of encountering the many wonderful and patient human beings with whom I shared one of the most exquisite periods of my life. Today, in my fifties, I am very proud of having made the decision to enter the Academy: the Royal Academy of Brussels in my first year, followed by subsequent years at the Academy of Tournai. Regarding my postgraduate studies, I should say that it was there that I primarily learned to experiment with what were then the new digital arts; however, for the purposes of this series, I will focus on the Academy of Fine Arts of Tournai, Be...

Mar I.A. *M20260110 Mixed media / Canvas 120 X 80 cm (47 X 31 In) 2026 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...