Finding Yourself Artwork

SERJ SABET British Visual Artist Northern Echo Prize for Fine Art 2006 "In my experience, painting has always been a natural process like breathing - except on a longer time scale. The first part of your artists life is spent ‘inhaling’ all that is relevant to your work from the world around you in order to build up a repertoire of subjects, and learning various vocabularies which can best express them. After this phase the really interesting part starts; where you can begin to ‘exhale’ all that you have absorbed in your art, the emotions and experiences you have accumulated in the course of a life time. Now I feel I am in my second phase, I have the ability to draw from each period the most important aspects which can use in my current work, to perfect them. It’s a kind of Proustian ‘remembrance of things past’, where in memory, the event or subject is distilled and crystallised stripped of everything but its essentials. Both, fantasy and real life experiences, are part of my memory and influence me in my painting style and colour" " My recent artworks are grounded by many questions I have asked myself in the last few years. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life now. What differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us? The relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth. In my recent work I have imagined a post-human condition that challenges the modern Western vision of the human being − and especially the presumed universal ideal of the white, male “Man of Reason” − as fixed centre of the universe and measure of all things. Today, the world seems dramatically split between technological optimism − which promises that the human body can be endlessly perfected through science − and the dread of a complete takeover by machines via automation and artificial intelligence. This rift has widened during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has forced us even further apart and caged much of human interaction behind the screens of electronic devices.