Ser Serpas. I fear (j'ai peur)

For the Bourse de Commerce, Ser Serpas has created a series of paintings and sculptures (covered in fabric) that are profoundly inspired by Alejandro Amenábar’s fantasy film The Others, especially when the voices of ghosts echo throughout the house, as if they were coming to inhabit its abandoned furniture and objects.

The scene of this exhibition, which also involves music (specially commissioned from Manchester artist Leyland Kirby, who revisits his emblematic project The Caretaker), cinema, and fashion, constitutes a veritable echo of how the artist has chosen to reconfigure the gallery space into a fantastical, ghostly site. New paintings by the artist hang from a metal curtain rod that traverses the entire space. Lying between abstraction and figurative representation, they reveal Serpas’ new tendency to dissolve the body as a way to express a loss of a grip on reality and the world around her.

These new large-scale paintings are oils on canvas of an “ashen” colour that appear almost erased, which for artist are like recollections of the past. These canvasses are inspired mainly by photographs of old romantic relationships or images showing the before and after of plastic surgery. The bodily fragments that appear, along with abstractions, resonate with the assemblages of objects she has arranged in the space, and which she has commissioned from performance artists on the basis of written instructions. During a musical evening on 9 September conceived by the artist as a performance and titled BASEMENT SCENE, formed using abandoned objects that are assembled and built into sculptures to the beat of a DJ set mixed by Ser Sherpas, followed by musical performances by two DJs from the New York and Tokyo scenes, Lydo and Yousuke Yukimatsu. After each performance, the resulting installation LOCKED CLUB will be presented as the snapshot of an afterparty. Performed and formed in the basement of the Bourse de Commerce, the sculptures were then moved into Gallery 3, thereby “cannibalising” the whole. A second version of BASEMENT SCENE was presented during the de-installation of the exhibition on January 27 2024.