A text occasioned by interviews with Stefan Serneels.

The ”Do it Yourself” anarchist life motto is characteristic for all of the works of Stefan Serneels. After his rambles through the RITS, his interest in Germanic philology and a year studying graphic art at Saint-Lucas, Serneels graduated in 1991 in ceramics. After a few years of mass production out of sheer necessity, it gradually became clear that his dark creative temperament would only find a satisfying sounding board in the passionate handling of matter at the service of the visual arts. His most famous work is characterized by black-and-white drawings with extreme variations of shades of grey values, a conscious out-of-control dripping, working wet-on-wet with Chinese ink wash and a collaged assembly of recycled pieces between his own drawings, having as theme an alienated, fragmented reality.

The work of Serneels is a dramatic dark underworld, that only sees the light through the cutaways on the white page, a created subconscious reality that he brings into being and that is full of distorted perspectives and surrealistic shapes, a homely horror, where objects often take on a repetitive leading role as subjects. It has to be said that Serneels almost could be an artistic adherent to psychoanalysis, an image analyser of his own subconscious mind, an intuitive artist of the chiselled unconscious world. Freud’s discovery in psychoanalysis of the unconscious/subconscious mind as a fundamental element of the human psyche has inspired Lacan to stress the importance of language in the fundamental discourse that is necessary to come to a meaningful completion as an answer to a question, without accepting the existence of the normal or abnormal. In this sense, it is not important to wonder about which questions Serneels searches for, but it is important to watch the fundamental measure to which Serneels develops by way of the image – the image as a language and sign systems – an image discourse as answer, an association of various image fragments that generate a work of art in relation to one another, that gives meaning in the mutual relation of the various fragments. Of course, meaning here acknowledges meaninglessness, the meaninglessness of the existence of each cultural object. However, the presence of the constructed work of art claims the reason of its existence. The essence is – remember Wittgenstein – equal to the sum of the resemblances that occur in the various shapes and words, but thus also in the image produced. In this sense, one can talk of the psychopictorial oeuvre of Serneels.

The context in which one looks and the culture in which one observes are, of course, of crucial importance to make the image enjoyable in the variety of possible interpretations. The subculture feeding Serneels’s world consists of underground-electro, industrial music, horror movies, manga and cult literature. Add to this a specific sensitivity for Outsider Art and a fascination for painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Neo Rauch, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Richter, Hans Bellmer, Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli and Francis Bacon, and one obtains, according to me, the perfect mix for a begeistert contemporary artist. It may be confusing to quote Outsider Art as a frame of reference for a professional artist, but this is certainly not the case for Serneels’s work. According to him, the classic drawing has too many limitations and is often built up with too much logic. His interest for Outsider Art originates from the fact that those artists can immediately shape a mental image, without bothering with the restrictions in the construction of a classical image. The mental image is reflected by means of an intuitive, immediate registration. Making such mental tension visible is for Serneels as important as generating mere formal tension. Contrary to many of his colleagues, Serneels does not search for the perfect, beautiful and lyrical image. The deconstructive reflex to destroy his perspectives and render unrealistic relations acceptable, as he says it, screws the meanings. The intended atmosphere does not have to be dramatic all the time for Serneels, but it has to translate a clear-cut tension. As time goes by, his images become more poetic and less aggressive. The narrative aspect is gradually taken over by its own plasticity. The epic aspect is replaced by a specifically enforced experiment in the construction of the image.

The source material for Serneels’s works of art consists of combined fragments from film stills, documentaries, photography, old magazines and digital images. In this way, a kind of assembling already arises in the primary sources for the work. Bringing together various snatches, often details, is the first trail in the quest for a synthesis in the construction of his work of art. Serneels is an artist who does not trace recycled images, but uses them as an impulse for the layout of his images, as the transcendence of the formal idiom from a hermeneutic point of view, so as to generate a new frame of interpretation. The direct recognizability of certain movies is often avoided. The mysterious dimension arises by selecting less explicit and referential scenes. They function then as a guideline for a specific filmic atmosphere and are never completely recuperated. His intuition determines which image eventually will serve as the basis for a work of art. Even though Serneels uses very diverse photographic images, one sees that various elements always recur. There is a kind of recognizability of successive resemblances. In this way, various perspectives, stairs, objects and middle-class interiors are repeated in very diverse works. They are often inspired by similar scene tension elements from specific film genres. The film stills then are only the impulse to the work of art and finally get their unique shape in the free sketch.

The preliminary study as a first specific phase of work through the time becomes an ever more conscious process in the creation of the work of art. It has become a fundamental rule of the game to recycle from among his drawings to come to paste-ups. Because of this, already in that stage he has acquired thorough attention for the study of his own technique. One could almost speak of a Serneels technique. The many years of exercise in mastering charcoal now pay in a very gestural research into the manipulation of Chinese ink. In pencil drawings also, gesturality has an important place, a rhythmic gesturality interwoven with almost calligraphic precision. He obtains the photographic effect in his ink drawings by elaborating black and grey tones in gradations by means of various, very specifically wrought experiments with Chinese ink wash. In doing this, he also gives a lot of attention to the quality of the material, the thickness and the kind of paper, the origin and texture of the ink and to an equally professional choice from a wide range of pencils and brushes. Serneels’s body of work throughout time then becomes a more and more controlled work process, in which his experience in several techniques guides his work, starting from very light tonalities and playing with the absorbing effects from paper in its relation to ink. The quest for sharp contrasts arises there by itself.

Serneels’s blueprint of paste-up drawings does not originate from previously determined paste-ups. The paste-ups arise from the material that he himself has drawn. Those drawings are built up from an intuitive drawing reflex and not by using prostheses such as beamers or overhead projectors. Serneels acknowledges the various possibilities that overhead projections offer, but they deprive him of the freedom of the form. He obtains this freedom by way of trade of drawing itself, in which each phase in the design of the drawing has to be correct. The compulsive urge of Serneels to continuously draw is fuelled by a passion for the deed of drawing on the one hand and by a fundamental displeasure in the confrontation with his limitations on the other hand. Serneels is extremely dissatisfied, causing him to never find his drawings good enough and never well-balanced enough, resulting in a destructive reflex: he destroys more work in his workshop than that he gives his daily creations the chance to see the light of day. He has learned to bridge this dissatisfaction by his almost compulsive filling of sketch books, without giving himself the opportunity to tear them up immediately.

The beauty in a visual artist such as Serneels is that his sense of his own limitations as a draughtsman becomes part of his own style. Tearing up and cutting out certain parts of the drawing and pasting it with fragments from other drawings has become his trademark. Throughout the years, he has learned to steer the paste-up technique of cutting and pasting in mingling drawing fragments, so that they form a better whole. There are now layers in his work. They have a quality that arises through combining. The logic of the classic drawing is broken and replaced by a new logic and by his own scripture. The bottom layer when working on canvas consists of gum, where pieces are painted over, plastered with, repainted, cut out or left out. This procedure can be seen as an expressive adjustment. His intuitively conscious method of associating and selecting gives Stefan Serneels the opportunity to work on several drawings at the same time. Contrary to what one might expect, he has not abused his own paste-up technique as a trick, but one can see an evolution towards less physical cutting and pasting. In his latest creations he generates more mental assemblies and paste-ups. The basic images are constructed more directly. His works of art also become more sober as times goes by. Yet, the paste-ups remain necessary in the work. Cutting, integrating and mixing of works has become aesthetics of demolishing, necessary for creating new aesthetics.

The multidisciplinary oeuvre of Serneels does not limit itself to mere drawing. The sculptures, short films, cartoons, installations, murals, drawing paintings and pure drawings influence one another. Yet, Serneels has a fondness for figurative draughtsmanship, where he embraces classic discernible figuration. The panoramic drawings enable him to reach out from the compression of the surface of the page, which is often too limited. There he can completely break through the phenomenon of less is more. By way of the panorama the freedom arises to bring together very diverse fragments. The mutual cohesions come into being as self-evident. They are a kind of abstract narrative relationships that in a way become joined with comics and the graphic novel. Working from a far-reaching intuition gives him the inspiration to deviate from illustrations, focussing on the free coming into being of the narrative world. By repeating certain forms, meaning is generated. The alienation in his work takes shape in the quest for a combination of coincidences. It is most certainly not a coincidence that the free associations from the long drawings, such as his sketch books, give material that can be recycled for diverse, more individual drawings. The specific use of black ink in the work of Serneels occurs more from an aesthetic point of view.

The expansion of the East Indian ink wash, the use of dirty water and the diversification of grey values make me see Stefan Serneels evolve by way of the ink from a draughtsman to a painter. He experiences the canvas as a carrier that is too solid and mysterious, that deprives him of the freedom to tear up the image. The absorptive power and the porosity of the paper do not only bestow a kind of fragility to the carrier, but also to the image. Serneels blames his use of only black-and-white on his inability as a true born draughtsman to employ the colours the way a painter does, a technical shortcoming that he manages to benefit from. Colours at the moment do not add anything to his resolute handling of shadows, referring to horror images and film noir. It is exactly by handling black-and-white that he can emphasize continuity in the mingling of subject, object and context. It is a uniformization of the image where form and image mix, a kind of feigned logic in clear, illogically constructed images. The contrasts black and white can be seen as a metaphor to exempt a whole world of colours against their reading and to stir the tension of the mental synaesthetic thinking.

Whereas previously only charcoal was allowed to stick to the page, the evolution towards ink and its subtle grey values coloration is in the line of the filmic dissection of images. Through the layers in the grey values a layering in the image also unfolds. By means of zooming in and zooming out, the use of dehumanized figures and humanized objects even the innocence of, for example, a rocking horse is questioned. The works of Serneels are often about spaciousness. Not the space in itself is important: the concise reference to a space or object bestows the necessary tension by not explicitly translating it. Serneels’s works are mainly located in interior spaces, claustrophobic spaces in which subjects and objects are connected with one another by means of various manoeuvres, continuous dynamic environments that contrast with the static middle-class interiors. The futility of their relationship reflects a rigid, frozen image, as a film still of a moving, repeating manoeuvre. Objects become personages and give occasion to changing movements. His distorted worlds bestow on the specific contorted objects the possibility to be themselves the origin of a human figure.

Serneels refers to the image in Murphy by Samuel Beckett to translate this line of thought: the experience of being tightly wedged in a wheel chair to be able to mentally free oneself. In this way, certain objects in Serneels’s images become mental actors in the expressive play. The setting or scene of his dark sights takes up the eye by means of manipulated perspectives, corridors and rooms to an accumulated discharge of visual tension. The pictorial context elements are enforced with figures and sketches of, for example, individuals with long braids from Japanese movies, which appear as mystic persons integrated in a petit bourgeois interior. The recognizable, homely furniture, the chandeliers and the wall paper bathe in an atmosphere of drama and horror. Balloons and Pippi Longstocking braids, adulated with innocence, are interwoven with meaningless objects. They are all narrative tension elements in composite, merely insinuated sight. By making connections with lines between the various pictorial elements the mutual relationship between subject and object is intensified. Serneels compares the construction of the image with early Medieval art, that also did not have a central perspective. In those days one dared to create internal spaces in landscapes by way of a few line constructions.

One could characterize Serneels’s work as playing with the limitation of lines to realize a figuration, as if only a shadow carries enough information in itself to visualize an entire personage. For this masterly subtle technique of insinuation he refers to the Hitchcock movies and Nosferatu, a kind of pictorial technique that can unveil fast and efficiently very complex constructions and that settles on the fantasy and mental image representation of the observer. While the alienating works of Serneels stimulate our retina, the images devour our attention by means of a psychopictorial world that keeps at least me passionately charmed.

Sven Vanderstichelen, 2010