David Serisier: Absolute Objectivity

David Serisier didn’t need to become a painter. He seems to have had plenty of other career options. His first degree was in English literature: he might have become a professor, novelist, or even an art critic. Instead he went on to study painting in Sydney and at the New York Studio School. But if he hadn’t become an artist he might also have made an excellent scientist. It’s clear from his paintings, which explore the effects of light on colour, that he certainly could have handled the classic scientific method. His work is rigorous, methodical and he has very keen powers of observation. In fact, several of his recent projects are almost structured like laboratory experiments designed to achieve that tantalisingly unattainable goal of all scientists: absolute objectivity.

To select a colour for his monochromatic paintings, Serisier has devised a painstaking, almost scientific method designed to reduce subjective influence. First he chooses what he calls “an ephemeral light event”. Then, using photographic images of that event, he isolates individual colours using software such as Photoshop, prints them out on a digital printer, and “re-forms” the chosen colour in oil paint on canvas. He is very particular about the use of this phrase. For him, there are subtle distinctions between mediation, replication and re-formation. “The colour has been re- formed through these multiple processes,” he explains.

“It is a multigenerational process in which the colour is transformed, yet is still linked to the beginning.”

Serisier often sources information for his work from roadtrips and he developed this process in response to a fluorescent light tube piece by the American minimalist Dan Flavin which he had seen in Marfa, Texas. In the works on show at Liverpool Street Gallery in David Serisier: 2008, the artist explains that he tried to re-form the colours from memory, and although he felt the paintings were successful, he says, “I failed to connect. Memory was not a very good way of dealing with it.” For his Fluorescent Sun paintings of 2012, Serisier returned to Flavin and Marfa, but this time he set up the appropriately coloured fluorescent light tubes in his studio and through a series of experiments settled on his multi-step process for choosing colours.

In his most recent work, Gallium Sky, the transient light event being scrutinised through Serisier’s semi- scientific method is James Turrell’s 2013 LED light installation at the Guggenheim in New York. Although he admires Turrell’s work, his project is not an homage as such. “I’ve always been really interested in a lot of work by light and space artists and the way that they developed ideas out of painting. I’ve been thinking for a long time how can I bring those ideas back into painting,” Serisier explains. “Turell’s show was an ephemeral light event: it’s been structured, it’s been captured, it’s become a form of readymade.”