towards the white buffalo
Sounding more like Native American folk art than an exhibition of Minimal Art, the title of David Serisier’s recent exhibition, ‘Towards the White Buffalo’, is not such an obscure reference when one considers its ethereal standpoint. Serisier’s canvases offer a similarly ethereal spatial reading that calls on natural phenomena. Take the painting untitled blue square painting (Interstate-10) (2010); does it not transport the viewer through its heavenly cerulean blue hue?
Furthermore, with its title’s loose ‘interstate’ reference to America’s intercity stretches, the question posed is how we are to read these paintings in the Australian context? Standing in front of this striking blue painting one is washed with the pervading image of a distinctly Australian landscape, of our vast open skies, thin with light and yet razor sharp etching the horizon. It is impossible to separate the association. But these are paintings not meant to be read; they stem from a non-objective premise.
Our human compulsion is to find associations in the paintings we face; our brains hardwired for meaning: yellow = sun, black = night, blue = sky. In using a hue as charged as this Serisier has set himself a difficult task to lift the viewer beyond such associations and for the work to be considered in purely formal terms. However, sitting within the context of the five other similar paintings, they perform like swatches from a primary colour wheel and make sense as considered experiments that move beyond the emotive response.
For a viewer bewitched by associations, when engaging with an exhibition such as the minimal paintings of David Serisier it is equally impossible not to consider it within a lineage of artists working in the colour field