“Anger,” from Serge Strosberg’s “Sins of Paris” series depicting the seven deadly sins
Sins and the city
Belgian painter Serge Strosberg finds inspiration in Manhattan
By Jan Engoren
Following in the footsteps of European artists Willem de Kooning and Gaston Lachaise, Belgian-born painter Serge Strosberg has adopted New York as his second home. When opening his first U.S. studio, he settled on Soho because of the constant activity on Broadway.
“New York inspires me,” Strosberg says. “I feel as if I’m living in a Hopper cityscape painting.” Originally from Antwerp, Belgium, Strosberg graduated from the Parisian graphics design school, L’Académie Julian, where luminaries Gauguin, Bonnard, Matisse, and Léger also studied.
Strosberg chose to come to Manhattan because of the dynamic contemporary art scene, and after less than six months, Strosberg already feels like a New Yorker. “Americans and other nationalities blend in here very easily,” he says. “I always felt like an outsider, even in my country of birth, because of my black hair, dark skin and Sephardim heritage, in Paris I was often mistaken for an immigrant from North Africa.”
His sense of being an “outsider” is reflected in his paintings, which depict and seek to understand people from all walks of life: the seven-feet-tall bouncer; the Chinese actress who is at once open and ambivalent. His “Young Girl with Piercing” shows a pierced lesbian couple in a modern-day “Le Déjeuner sur L’hérbe” that would surely jolt Manet into the 21st century.
If portraiture captures not only the person but also the era, Strosberg has illustrated modern life in all its guises. Strosberg’s style has been characterized as a mix of expressionist and realist, outside the mainstream of the traditional British school of figurative portrait painting.
The eyes in his portraits reach out through the canvas and follow the viewer on their journey through the room. That his subjects show their private insecurities and flaws to us, the viewer, is a testament to Strosberg’s abilities as an artist. He explores the internal worlds of his subjects as if looking for a clue to his own.
“I’m searching for the soul. My work is intrusive. It goes beyond representation,” says Strosberg. “My objective is to capture the thoughts and feelings of my subjects in the moment. I’m interested in portraying their expression and translating it directly to the canvas.”
Painting is the road you take within yourself through another, until you spiritually embrace all that lives and moves in them,” says French art critic Jean-Louis Poitevin. “Looking at his [Strosberg’s] work, you must cover the same ground, and also set off on a voyage of discovery of the unknown person in front of you.”
Poitevin explains, “Serge’s interest in each individual pushes him to try to capture the maximum emotive power of the model without recourse to pictorial artifice, to unlikely poses or brusque gestures. In concentrating on a dense and compact look, he offers a view of the vastness of the other.”
Before deciding to become a painter, Strosberg was a chemist and uses his chemistry knowledge to great effect in mixing his pigments. In Europe, he had the opportunity to study with a well-known German craftsman, learning the skill that the old masters used, mixing oil with egg tempera and special dyes to create vivid pigments.
Strosberg traveled to Italy to obtain these dyes, and used this method to add a three-dimensional texture to his portraits. This technique brings a luminosity and animation to his subjects. The mixing of the dyes and pigments is a very physical process, whereby Strosberg crushes the pigments to the right consistency and folds them into the oil to create the proper viscosity. He is one of only a few artists in the world using this ancient method.
On display for his New York opening are his latest works, “Sins of Paris,” (“Péchés de Paris”) and his “Métro” series. In the works, Strosberg experiments with storyboard-like, cinematography-oriented, narrative panels that explore socially relevant topics by using the same models in a progressive series. “Sins of Paris,” explores the seven deadly sins in a lively, colorful, seven-act montage, giving contemporary interpretations of pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed, and sloth.
His paintings of scenes from the Paris métro convey his view of a contemporary, graffiti-covered, non-glamorized Paris, illustrating the loneliness and isolation of its citizens. In one frame we see what could be a self-portrait of the artist, a young man sits meditatively, his gaze lowered, his eyes half-closed caught alone in a private reverie, while in the other frames, he captures a sense of movement and a snapshot of everyday passengers as they travel to their destinations.
“I love to paint everyday New Yorkers,” Strosberg says, “such as janitors in uniform, policemen and taxi drivers. My next project will be to translate the ‘Sins of Paris’ into the ‘Sins of New York’ and put a local spin on this ancient theme.”
Starting April 5 and running through June 29, Strosberg’s paintings will be on view in Paris as part of a group show entitled “Expressionism and Humanism, the Human Figure and the Jewish Experience,” at the Museum of Pontoise. The exhibitions includes works by Soutine, Modigliani, Chagall, Alex Katz, Camille Pissarro, Lucian Freud, and others.
