Harkawik is happy to announce our solo exhibition with Guillermo Serrano Amat, his first in the US. Born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1993, Serrano Amat has, for the previous two years, known as New York each residence and muse, establishing in paint a type of parallell actuality to his personal, one that enables his singular perspective to flourish. His palette is borrowed from the proponents of the Neue Sachlichkeit; his perspective from Terry Gilliam. He makes in depth use of codecs extra frequent to seventeenth century Mannerism than to up to date portray—lengthy, winding apertures that enable motion to emerge from the angle of a distant interloper, unfurling throughout the image aircraft with escalating verve, till it arrives crashing at our footsteps. Basically, he occupies the place of the outsider, observing (and recreating, in beautiful element) the trivia of social encounters, reminding us of the grotesque and unwieldy features of human conduct and interplay, and the odd confluence of historic circumstances, beliefs, and organic imperatives that join gesture with which means, bodily attributes with want, and proletariat with polity.
Serrano Amat constructs scenes which are as laden with art-historical references as they’re with the logic of movie. The Idlers is in actual fact titled after Chaplin’s 1921 The Idle Class, a brief by which a recreation of golf serves to commingle the Tramp’s working poor with the nouveau riche within the efficiency of leisure. In works like Ridgewood Noir, a card recreation erupts in a ballet of arms, recalling the rooms of George Grosz, the visages of Christian Schad, or the work of American counterparts like Thomas Hart Benton, Ivan Albright, and Ernie Barnes. Furthermore, we see the affect of Béla Tarr’s social cinema, Dario Argento’s kaleidoscopic movie gels, Robert Bresson’s narrative ambiguity, and Jacques Tourneur’s psychological atmospheres. Serrano Amat’s faces are every rendered as if seen at shut vary via a fisheye lens; thus, the subjective expertise of every particular person is thrust indiscriminately on the viewer. On this manner, as he borrows from historic modes to compose and coloration these encounters, the anxiousness invoked by the packed streets and watering holes that fill his work is a distinctly up to date one; it’s the anxiousness of too many main views, too many particular person subjectivities and must deal with.
The Idlers presents us scenes of nice social conflagration, by which gestural motion, its import unsure, is allowed to hold away our consideration, and, often the contents of an unattended purse or beverage. The important thing to understanding these works may not be the plain factors at which our bodies come collectively, however the locations the place the images themselves break down. There’s a determine lingering within the doorway of Launched to the Household, his face comprised of only a few concise brushstrokes, a bluegrass trio in Ridgewood, their visages melting away into their devices, as if the plucking of a banjo would possibly pluck away a nostril or mouth, and a malingerer within the window (the body of which is barely greater than a patch of uncooked canvas) whose wrist, neck and face appear to emerge from the identical twisted stump, a patch of smoke in San Gennaro that’s little greater than the reminiscence of a brush, dragged and twisted rigorously throughout the canvas. Parts of black comedy could also be attributed to the painter’s curiosity within the flip of the century Spanish literary motion Eserpento, and but, these are unabashedly American photos. Whereas it’s troublesome to discover the notion of the American Dream with out giving house for its myriad fallacies, injustices and myths, maybe given our fractious political local weather, we’d do effectively to note the exuberance in Serrano Amat’s heterogenous lots, and to relish the dusty beliefs of this nation of immigrants.
