Artist and nurse, Yannick De Serre is a singular figure in the Quebec art world. His artistic practice is always colored by the events, sometimes tragic, that he experiences on a daily basis. In Resilience and other healings, the exhibition he is presenting at the OBORO art center until December 10, the artist summons the notions of presence and absence, life and death. “In my practice as a nurse, we come into contact with death quite regularly, and we are not necessarily equipped to manage our multiple traumas. His works are presented as an extension of the bereavements that caregivers have to face.
To evacuate and heal
De Serre approaches his approach as a place of healing. It stems from a vital need to take the time and find oneself. “In the emergency room, we are in the acute, in discomfort. It is a work environment where time is missing and absent. To be able to take a moment to sit down and give yourself the space to create a ritual is really important. »
This time, apart from the time he devotes to exchanges imbued with sensitivity, which he tries to multiply with his patients, is embodied in the attention injected into his projects of an artistic nature. Through various methods, he seeks to transpose all the grief that accompanies it and to soothe it. “Resilience for me is the ability to move on without keeping all the traces of these traumas. De Serre is sensitive to the painful experiences of human loss, but not immune to them. With his experience, he tries to “say with the right and true words” the emotional crossings imposed by these trials, and “to [les] register, of [les] communicate[’en] leave footprints.
“After the first death I had to face, I was looking for a ritual object; then I came across a handkerchief, which I bought and left by my workshop table. Over time, I used it to wipe my surface, my engraving plates, my hands, my ink smudges. Little by little, Yannick De Serre weaves through this cycle an intimate relationship with the dead he rubs shoulders with. Each death marked by the choice of a new handkerchief, each handkerchief marked by new works in the making. “It’s a witness, a fairly powerful workshop artifact. »
Expose the ritual
In OBORO, he presents many shrouds containing these symbolic fabrics. “This project takes its meaning from the accumulation. The fact that it is presented mid-career is important: it confirms that the ritual works and offers healing over time. If these handkerchiefs each channel a particular death, De Serre lists them periodically. At the end of each year, he takes a large Japanese paper where he collects them and folds them according to an established gesture, then bundles the whole thing and the label before recording it with the previous ones.
This ongoing project — “until I retire” — bears witness to his last 17 years of work in the emergency department. Precise, the series of gestures he performs creates this moving ritual aspect that we recognize in the artist-nurse. It exhibits the delicate research that he conducts around affects. In the exhibition room, the series of shrouds lean against an altar which shows sutured fabrics and the tools of artistic and nursing work. Printed works showing fatal bouquets overhang it, constituting a final tribute.
Combine two lives
The cohabitation of De Serre’s two jobs offers him a range of materials, instruments, subjects and techniques that intersect the art world and the hospital environment. “For me, it becomes my workshop tools. An exacto is a scalpel, I cut my paper with surgical scissors, the drypoint I use for my engravings is a medical needle. This is the strength of De Serre’s work. Expressing through art the motives of a demanding and engaging profession, the artist creates a harmony between intensive care and the workshop that culminates in this hoped-for cure.
“My work resides in these dualities between the rough and the soft. This is manifested among other things by my stitches, which I put forward to inscribe words that connote and reinforce the purpose of my works. It’s a way for me to play with the notion of scar, to talk about imprint and trace. His artistic work, minimalist, favors an aesthetic and material sobriety to talk about strong and hard subjects. Starting from the idea that with little, we are able to decipher a lot, De Serre offers in each detail important clues for the message of the work. In short, he produces sensitive and delicate projects that counterbalance the trying weight of the daily dramas experienced in the hospital.