Serbin's Model of Intentions is a strategy for reading the history of a particular time in art, a time which Serbin continually returns to, seeking a verisimilitude that does not correspond to the literality of painting or its historical knowledge but rather to an approximation to the different abstract painting’s stratigraphic layers of meaning, wherein he locates an exploration mediated by the interplay of signifiers of abstraction and mass culture.
Vincent Serbin presents us with an ambiguous work, full of intentions, of a verisimilitude not guided by the representation of literary mimesis, but by a conceptual approach, equally ambiguous, consolidated in contradictory titles such as Anomalous Toon, Conductive Toon, Convergence Toon, or Innocuous Toon, among others embodied in his most recent work, where everything is a reflection and consolidation of his particular painterly act.
It is an intentional act by Serbin, corresponding to a selection of presentational plastic gestures of abstraction that lead him to dehierarchize the hierarchical, to contaminate the seemingly uncontaminated, achieving all this through his particular and intentional interpretation of the art reality he approaches.
As a strategy, Vincent Serbin's Model of Intention plays with fantasizing about a reality by having the viewer imagine encountering a Toon, setting up their encounter in a territory unimaginable for the viewer, the realm of abstraction. However, there it is, mixed with that other language, tied to it through the act in which the artist determines how to fantasize about the abstract real when watching that strange Toon in a space it does not belong to. Serbin finds and resolves a new form of identification in the pictorial field, which states not only what painting within art can look like but also how that way of representation, full of ambiguity and discursive multiplicity, is seen, in this case by the public.
Vincent Serbin's recent work is a further step in the study, observation, and realization of an oeuvre in which opposites play and complement each other through a strange seduction. An action in which, through the artist's models of intention, a countless number of real possibilities are constructed, capable of making us see, through a kaleidoscopic gaze, the amplifications of abstract reality allowed by the supports, the cropped frames, or the absence of their limit, and all come together in the pictorial fields created by the artist.
Each Toon represents an intention, a model that expresses a reality that does not need to be treated as the truth of its present. Serbin and his work move within mixed and hybrid times and representations, typical of a continuous interpretation of different worlds and languages. These works are always understandable as parallel realities, in which human intelligence, invited by the artist to interpret them, arises from the ability to provoke, direct, and control the operations through which new realities are created and managed, generated from the intention to know them and become their owner.
Elizabeth Marin