Objects Horizon: Jojo Serrano

Serrano sets out to lay down images from a gridded source – the remnants of a media seemingly on its way to obsolescence – the print media  - to lay it all down on a ground of primed canvas, gridded to its approximate position from its collaged study.  He had been utilizing this method, learned from school, as a cultivated practice in composing forms and colors for his paintings.  It had never failed him, and so it persists as a tool, and as a practice, especially for its infinite potential for its reconfigurability.  Collage’s history is essentially tied however, to the print media.  It is also said that the invention of the printing press ushered in the modern era – as it heralded the mass reproducibility and distribution of information. Images and text arranged in a grid, placed in narrative cohesion on a page, inadvertently create subtext of reading through such a format. Collage complicates this further by compressing time, context, and space in the random juxtaposition of words and images, doing away with the classical pictoriality of window views and linear perspectives.  Time and space flatten to mere forms. Meaning derived from it can only be accidental or through a persistent human habit of apophenia – to seek patterns in everything.

For Serrano, meaning is in the practice itself – the way he selects images, cuts them out and glues them unto paper, and how he transfers them unto canvas – the way he verily transposes them from one material to another – paper to pigment, and how it cycles back to images themselves, as they get documented, or photographed, and filed, and archived, and transposed into the virtual world as they get posted on his personal social media account or the gallery’s website.  This procedural transposition begets the forms’ own world, a horizon of objects considered for their mere plasticity. Comparable perhaps to how forms are generated by large language models through an algorithm set out by random data.  And yet, how are forms created? Or even conceived of, despite them being recurrent configurations of one thing?  They are rather conceived at the moment of perception, and objects shimmer on that horizon.*

*with apologies to Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses

Lena Cobangbang