sergio sericolo artist's statement

I think of my work as natural abstraction.

The paintings begin with splattered paint and turpentine, allowed to drip, puddle and run as they may on the canvas. Informed by the resulting textures and forms, I then employ traditional painting techniques to invent new natural imagery based on this abstract beginning.

These natural images resemble inorganic and anatomical elements, but are purely invented. I incorporate these forms into fabricated landscapes striving to create a strange symbiotic relationship between them. I use no photographs, or other images as a reference, but rather the paintings are created through constantly reacting to what has already been painted.

My drawings incorporate printed images from antique books that feature decorative bucolic themes, art historical engravings and other reproductions. Using these images as a starting point, I set out to depict nature as it might actually appear, to transform the ornamental impression of these book pages into one that is, though fantastic, essentially more real.

The first step in my process—scraping with razor blades and rubbing out with erasers—all but destroys the original printed images. Then I draw in and around the image fragments, letting the old forms and textures influence the new. Sometimes they become barely noticeable. Other times they are more prominent, serving as an integral part of the visual dialogue. But the line between what was original to the plate and what I’ve added to it is always blurred.

I have taken reproductions and, through the process of destruction,
have created pieces that are one-of-a-kind.

In all of my work I am in a constant dialogue, always trying to find the connections between what I can and can’t control, between the real and the imaginary, the natural and artificial.