Claude Serrile

Claude Serrile was born in 1946. He lives and works in Marseille.

Never has the Art of Fools been so present. And necessary.

When the immense Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) conceptualized the genre for the first time, baptizing it “Art Brut”, he could not imagine how much his heritage would gain a foothold in the coming century. is preparing to present for the first time a unique set of paintings, sculptures and calligraphy, all signed by outcasts, marginalized people as well as mentally ill people, from which he admits to having been largely inspired by himself.

We are then in 1945. Claude Serrile will be born a year later, in Marseille. In his twenties, the young man rubbed shoulders with Provencal people, before succumbing - under the influence of the artists presented by the avant-garde Galerie Françoise Dufaure - to the charms and creative power of the abstracts.

“ Villeglé struck me for his love of urban materials, his cut and glued obsessions ,” says Claude Serrile. “ Basquiat, on the other hand, symbolized for me raw, absolute energy, with works capable of erasing all the others around. I share with these two masters a deep love for the street. "

Throughout his life, Claude will never stop walking the streets of the craziest of French cities, in search of torn posters, marked boxes, graffiti “ coded or claiming to be ” to revisit them, " transform them, stack them, iron them over with acrylics, inks and even tar. "

The unconscious guides the gestures of Claude Serrile: “ the arrangement of the masses as the work of chromatic composition are always born of impulses, desires, an interior dialogue as well as feelings, often very contradictory, that I experience in front of the society. "

Claude Serrile also likes to describe himself as a worker, a fabric maker, for whom project management and good craftsmanship are as important as the conceptual dimension: “ the papers, cardboard or objects that I use are, most of the time , of an ordinary banality "explains the plastic artist." It is only under the hand of the artisan-artist that they drape themselves with an aesthetic, meaningful and committed dimension. The movement between street imports towards the workshop are major. "

Biography written by Théophile Pillault