José Luis Serzo – ‘Las tentaciones de Courbet’
March 24th – May 21st
From Thursday 24 March, the Alvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the solo exhibition of the artist José Luis Serzo, who is, in the words of the historian Juan Manuel Bonet, “one of the most powerful voices of figuration today”. The exhibition, which includes paintings, sculptures and installations, can be visited until mid-May.
José Luis Serzo (Albacete 1977) returns with a new series that promises to be one of the most subversive and disturbing of his career. Courbet’s temptations could be the life we do not dare to live: the people we want to merge with or the places we want to go despite the terror of throwing ourselves into the void. José Luís Serzo (Albacete, 1977) uses the painter Gustav Courbet as an excuse to take us to a stage where pleasure, eroticism and guilt dance; a pictorial and sculptural daydream that shows us the world without any qualms or filters. From Courbet’s dreams and fears imagined by Serzo, we are witnesses to a study of eroticism linked to fantasy, long banished from the sex we practice in this omnipantal society. In this exhibition, Serzo studies sexuality lived as a game and approaches the female anatomy with an almost frightening authority; bodies that are landscapes, postures that are the stellar movement of the universe. She fills them with palpitating iconographies, masks of death, flowers, eroticised garlic and a sea of crimson curtains that seem to us like skirts towards the madness of feeling, losing our senses in the process. And so he tells us that to live intensely is also to approach death.
Lidón Sancho Ribés, art critic and writer.
Short biography and CV:
José Luis Serzo is a multidisciplinary artist who, through his paintings, drawings, photographs, objects, installations and literature, unifies different topics where the imaginary and the reality take shape in an original way in a mise-en-scène, creating exhibition-stories and allowing to exploit different disciplines. He began his studies of Humanities in Albacete, to later study Art in Toledo, however, he finished his studies in Madrid, where he had several exhibitions from very early on.
Some of his best known series are ‘Post Show’, ‘El fantástico vuelo del hombre cometa’, ‘Thewelcome’, ‘Los sueños de I Ming’ or ‘Los Señores del Bosque’. He has participated in exhibitions in museums, art centres, galleries and fairs around the world, such as in Munich, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, among others.Serzo has also engage into the world of cinema producing a short film called ‘Archimétrica’, which has won several international awards between 2020 and 2021.
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