Jesús Serrano

In the summer of 1980, during my first trip to New York, the visit to the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), specially the works of American abstract expressionism, shocked me in such a way that passion for painting woke up deep inside me at that moment and it will became my main purpose for the rest of my life.

Next summer I came back to New York to spend my school teacher’s holidays taking my first painting classes at the School of Visual Arts. At that moment I was 30.

Returned to Majorca I didn’t stop painting. I worked with sand, cement, earth … The attraction to textures, reliefs, everything tactile, etc, will be a constant along my work.

I needed to continue learning, so I asked for a licence at work and I came back to New York, where the year 1983-84 I registered again at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design. At this second school I discovered papermaking and from the first moment I considered handmade paper a perfect material for my artworks. In Barcelona I worked with Lawrence Barker, who showed me how to get handmade paper from cotton textiles.

My papers were completelly abstract at the beginning, but as time went by, new images similar to primitive shapes appeared: archaeological objects, amphoras, human beings in motion… At that moment it became clear my need to enlarge technical and expressive skills. Then I registered in Drawing and Painting at Barcelona’s Escola Massana.

Since then my work is more figurative: landscapes – specially seascapes – nudes, portraits…, where colour, as usual, is the main actor without forgetting my love to thick brushes (Van Gogh, Soutine, Jorn, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach…)

In 2003, in Spain, a big political movement against the Iraky war and against Spanish Government participation in the invasion took place. Besides marching against the war I realized several pieces that I called them “Faces of the war” where I expressed my totally opposite feelings to that barbarousness.

After that sequence of faces, the Spanish political reality brought me to paint the dramatic situation of immigrant people – mostly Africans trying to reach the Spanish coast. I paint crowded old boats, drown people, men with no features, amputated, with no rights…

In March of 2010, after a therapeutic negligence I became a person with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which has changed completely my life. After a couple of years I started developing Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and two years ago I lost my tolerance to chemical conservative in paint tubes. So, I can’t paint now. But following Matisse’s cut-outs example when he couldn’t paint, since spring of 2015 I’m working the collage, technique in which I feel great doing it because I can use a extraordinary material: the paper I made 30 years ago and I have kept, carefully, in a perfect condition in my atelier.

Jesús Serrano – 2017

I have been working on the collages with my handmade paper lately , but changing the theme : instead of flowers, the colourfields are predominant with fruits as the subjet.And I have continued with faces made out of handmade paper or cardboard. I cut my sheets of handmade paper and i created nudes with great colours and textures. In the last years my problems with Chemical Sensitivity have improved and I came back to oil on canvas , painting everyday objects:coffee-pots,teapots,cups,flowers,vases…where colour,as usual,is the big protagonist