Why does Andres Serrano—an artist perpetually preoccupied with the Zeitgeist, and a notorious victim of its vitriol—now turn his attention to figures rendered half a millennium ago? Sifting through images rendered by Michelangelo nearly 500 years ago, Serrano reflects, “What happens in the past does not always stay in the past”. This past includes his own, as he returns to painting for the first time since enrolled at The Brooklyn School of Art almost fifty years ago. To make the works on view, Serrano photographed, enlarged, printed, and painted onto images he took at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Villa Borghese, and his own library of books. With energetic brushstrokes, he transmogrifies the cardboard backing used as his palette into a framing device for Christian iconography, as well as the act of reification.

While many of his recent works visualize destruction—indexing the vilification and vandalism that has laid claim to both his work and his career—in this series, Serrano enacts resurrection. Wielding a brush like a crozier, he invigorates long-chronicled subjects with renewed energy, humanizing symbols of empire with fragility. The titles of these paintings genuflect to a sense of doom: Sad Christ, Torso with missing limbs, Angel of death, Eternal sleep. In imagery that transcends nationhood, he renders figures that retch but cannot wreak.

Benjamin Bertocci describes his work using the concept of ontologies, a biological term that describes factors animals need to identify for their survival. A lion’s ontology includes the sun, thorns, and hare—but not shellfish, caves, or leavened bread. When encountering a factor outside its ontology, creatures grapple with hurdles by weaponizing tools of reason. In his Philosopher paintings, Bertocci looks to the ontology of the human, which involves “navigating family life in the post-generative AI, late-capitalist pre-apocalypse.” His paintings materialize anxieties around these conditions even more than they illustrate his concerns. In the face of immeasurably accelerating technologies and resource scarcities, how does one face the present?

Serrano gives one possible answer to this conundrum by concretizing the ontology of the artist. Wielding reason within the factors of artmaking—technique, content, circulation, history, devotion—he resurfaces immortal images that have, for centuries, provided wisdom for the crises that ensue. Most notably, Serrano reifies the power of credence in times inconceivable.

(Jack Radley, November 2024)

What attracted me to organizing In battle or in vain was the similarities of Serrano’s and Bertocci’s articulations. Not their tonality, because they are very much their own voice but there is something sympathetic, at the core, it’s the struggle to define reality, to create central meanings. Our fingertips grazing the vail again and again missing to pushing it back to get a clear view.

Early on in developing the exhibition, we all met at Serrano’s space. I remember the edge of Serrano’s mouth gave a slight curl in reverberation to his statement, “Well but anyone with two eyes could see understands that”. There was a kind of childish affect to his voice, it felt a bit like being tease but also somehow it was generous as well. Serrano was pushing past that his intervention was to breath life into the sculpture’s broken bodies, as a surface read. “I’m painting on the photographs and I very much enjoy doing it” Bertocci gave a thoughtful smile as he looked at Serrano’s new body of works. Serrano and Bertocci had only briefly meet before, now at Serrano’s home there was a feeling of balance between both of their art practices in their discussion. Serrano, Ever generous talked shop on the process to make the pieces.

It’s damning but nonetheless. In their own way I see two artist working through presence or time and concerned with the tone of the dialogue around existing. Time undos everything and in this case destroys objects and culture infantilizes the artist’s actions. Serrano and Bertocci examine the core aspect of representation and the personification of the object, the historical object, sculpture for Serrano. For Bertocci, it’s a visual event, like documentation of a dead body or flare or sun spot in an image. Both point to the natural and tangible, Benjamin language is more focused on the primal, seeing something in a pre-scientific light. There is no new, that doesn’t become ritual. Even what is terrifying we memorialize, I think it was Zizek that gave the analogy about a tiger entering into the temple first met with screams the second time he visits he is met with revelry and becomes a ritual. Soon the disfunction just gives way to narrativizing, which I would suggest both Bertocci and Serrano work is positioned against, that normalizing moment. Remaining with the new, remaining with the discomfort or even terror, that is now, that is life, that is decay. That is the signal flair being considered for worship and the statues being given life, it’s a mirror, an inverse.

Serrano’s meditation looks towards the crystallization of belief, the distance and officiation in each mark, placing him outside looking in on the work. For Bertocci, mediation is probing the limitations of reality and staying present in the moment where both fragility, terror and banality of existence regress and egress. These parallel realities expressed and emphasized as both the viewer and some organizing force navigate each other; do artists narratives. Well yes, but this isn’t the case or intended purpose, nor is it meant to be a stream of consciousness for the viewers to be witnesses. We are being drawn back to the most primitive belief, seeing something like spectral light, sun spot and visual flares and to allow these cues to be mystified. These aren’t moments of the beyond or even some form of significant communication, they are beautiful failures.

When we experience a statue, we see the failure of the the present and the lost promise of the past. Definitionally I see statues are nostalgic, to understand what lacks in the present moment and to romanticize an idealized past, like a grave stone, we don’t speak poorly of the dead. I don’t mean that as a derogatory remark, as an animal we try to find meaning, Benjamin is looking at creating gods from sun spots and narrativizing the shadows. Serrano is giving a breathe to time, providing chance.

(Nathan Bennett, November 2024)