SERENA FINESCHI "AFTER THE PARTY"

If there is a defining quality in the explorations of Serena Fineschi, it is that she tackles her works, materials and media bodily, in a highly physical confrontation that strips them to their barest essence.
For a long time, her work grappled with the mostly flat surfaces of materials - paper in particular - in order to bring out their visual - whether sculptural or painterly - and in any case, expressive potential.
In this hand-to-hand combat, this labour of distressing the material, stopping just shy of the breaking point, the material is transmogrified or transmuted and there is a transference in a metaphorical sense, yet also in a direct and practical sense, from the artist to the work, and vice versa.
For a long time, too, and this is one of the paradoxes of her works, Fineschi took a subtractive approach, abrading, crumpling and otherwise distressing her works in order to lend them a sculptural, spatial presence.
In After the Party, which is surely the artist’s first resolutely and essentially pictorial exhibition, the basic process seems to have been intrinsically reversed: Fineschi’s work consists of an accretion of matter, of material that is carefully and patiently prepared, assimilated and recomposed.
In reality, the artist’s act of beleaguering her media or raw material is still present, but it has been in a sense ‘internalised’. It no longer occurs externally, but to varying degrees, implicitly.
This intimate dialectical and visceral struggle with a pigmented medium which emerges transformed and sublimated, becomes an undertaking that exposes the metaphorical stakes of its own process of creation in the manner of an unspoken critical, social and political reflection.
As Serena Fineschi presents it, the festive title of this project should certainly be understood in a paradoxical, backhanded sense. It is true, the exhibition has an air of the aftermath of a party, which leads us to question at once the art world with its chronic excesses of reverence, and our entire society, which senses its decline without fully taking responsibility for it.
The creative gesture that informs the majority of these works and veiled pictorial homages (to various genres, trends and styles) thus takes on a direct metaphorical force, a glaring irony, as it encourages us, in its ambivalence, to reconsider the role and importance of debris and waste, these fragments of often forgotten or discarded memories and stories.
Yet, this stance also conveys a message of confidence and hope: hope vested in this capacity of ours to regenerate (ourselves), to breathe new life into our individual, social, aesthetic and political environment by refocusing on the fundamental gestures and processes of creative digestion, assimilation and recovery: An invitation to experience the body, the material, the mind and the age in which we live in full awareness of their evolution.

Emmanuel Lambion

Serena Fineschi's exhibition - After The Party - will present a series of new artworks, two site-specific installations, as well as two artworks from a private collection that will introduce the genesis of this project.
During Rendez-Vous, the artist recently exhibited a diptych dialoguing with the works from the permanent collection of the Old Masters Museum in Brussels. This diptych, a reflection on two major themes of Flemish painting, Vanitas and Memento Mori, inaugurates the Trash Series, a series of artworks that invite us to ask ourselves fundamental questions about the state of things: through their intrinsic poetry, their subjacent and barely veiled irony and irreverence, as well as through their after-party melancholy, the works of Serena Fineschi offer us fragments of possible answers.

Serena Fineschi (Sienna, 1973) lives and works between Sienna and Brussels. Her research is an unceasing, extenuating investigation beneath the surface of things, which she always faces and examines by “subtracting”, looking for a transformation beyond the apparent image of the skin of objects and materials.
In fact, Fineschi aspires to a transformation and transmutation of both the essence and the appearance of the image or skin of the objects and materials she uses.
Her artworks have been exhibited in various public and private institutions, such as: Collection Frédéric de Goldschmidt and Officina in Brussels, Belgium; the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Raffaele de Grada in San Gimignano, the SMS Complesso Museale Santa Maria della Scala in Sienna, the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Palazzo delle Papesse in Sienna, the Corderie dell’Arsenale of Venice (during the 15th Architecture Biennial 2016), the Casa Masaccio Arte Contemporanea of San Giovanni Valdarno in Italy.