Yannick De Serre Resilience and Other Healings

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.