Yannick De Serre Resilience and Other Healings
Yannick De Serre, Les outils, 2022. Photo : Jean-Michael Seminaro
For the past 18 years, multidisciplinary artist Yannick De Serre has also practiced as a critical care nurse. He accompanies patients daily through the announcement of various diagnoses and treatments, acute and chronic illnesses, healing, loss of autonomy, births, death of loved ones, etc. Resilience and Other Healings addresses a significant aspect of his work: mortality. Since 2004, the beginning of his career in hospitals, De Serre has been recording and preserving every death he has encountered. For each patient who unfortunately passes away at his side, he sets in motion a post-mortem ritual and transposes this mourning into his artist’s studio.
At each departure, the artist acquires a symbolic object, a lace handkerchief embroidered with flowers. The handkerchief, a symbol of mourning and sadness after the loss of a loved one, lives alongside him in his daily creative art space. De Serre uses it to clean work surfaces and to wash his hands, and sometimes to wipe out his printmaking tools or to create monotypes. At the end of each year of work, the tissues are wrapped and preserved in a Japanese paper shroud: one bundle for each year of work completed. This ritual is repeated annually. At OBORO, De Serre presents the 17 shrouds he has designed since the beginning of his nursing career. These seemingly fragile works dither between softness and brutality. It is in the act of contemplation, of both the subject matter and the material, that De Serre’s work takes on its full meaning.
The artist would like to thank OBORO for the presentation of this mid-career project as well as art historian Émilie Granjon for the analysis and presentation of this project.
Yannick De Serre, Les outils, 2022. Photo : Jean-Michael Seminaro
Yannick De Serre lives and works in Montreal since 2004. He holds two bachelor’s degrees completed at Université Laval: the first in Visual Arts and the second in Nursing. De Serre explores the expanded practices of printmaking and drawing through the encounter and installation of two- and three-dimensional works. He has shown his work throughout Quebec and has participated in major international art fairs (Papier-2015 to 2018, Art Basel-2013, TIAf-2011, Sydney and New-York-2010). His works are included in numerous private and institutional collections. The artist’s recent work emphasizes the notion of “caring”. His work has been supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. You will soon be able to see his work at the Atoll Art Center (Victoriaville-2023) and at Presse-Papier (Trois-Rivières-2023).