Discover the contemporary work of Laurent SERRE

After having happily discovered the material, wood, silk, steel, enamel, wicker, wool and clay during my middle and high school years, I came across an old leather satchel in an attic one day. A particular sensation escaped from it, took possession of my hands, and spread through my veins. I was captivated, conquered, bewitched without hope or will of remission. The skin affected my senses, took up residence in my entire being.

A road has opened up, of discoveries, learning, patience, sometimes disappointments, often fullness with Leather and vegetable tanning as the only master. Learning to choose it according to the work, hunting for or creating tools, feeling how to use them, developing experiences, sliding from one attempt to another, learning without ever knowing. Investing in an old, beautiful and efficient tool, looking for technical books from the beginning of the last century, being inhabited by this world permanently.   

Engraving came to embellish small utilitarian objects, belts, bags, cigar boxes, coasters and belt buckles, then it took up more space, more format and more time, until it settled alone on the work table.

Vegetable leather became my preferred medium, ancestral, loaded with history and the smell of tannins, responding to water and modeling, trapping and alive, supple and perfumed. A bird of prey that soars, a cheetah that awakens, a sail that catches the wind, a Basque house that takes shape before my eyes, a woman who combs her hair or who dances... a preference for nature and its live shows, an appetite for everything that is engraved, repelled, inked and shaded.

A roll of leather and a kit of selected tools fit easily in a suitcase and very few have been my trips and journeys that have passed without them. Many of my pieces have been worked on the tablet of a hotel room, or the kitchen corner of a studio, from Sarthe to the Gironde, from Latin America to Asia. In the course of my life and travels, I have lost friends and illusions, but the powerful presence of leather has never left me.
I do not feel attracted to artistic creation, I am only inhabited by a passion that has taken the forms, perfumes and reflections of a material that has taken possession of an important part of my life, and that I try to respect and honor in each piece.

I now work with a knife at engrave on full grain leather and a pyrographer on leather crusts (split), always vegetable tanning because it responds to water and allows modeling. The colors that I use, apart from vegetable pigments, tea, walnut husk, ... are now Chinese inks, which let the grain of the material appear under the color.

In more than 45 years, I have taken the same pleasure in smelling, engraving and painting some 400 pieces without counting the everyday objects of my beginnings, of a format between approx. 18 x 30 cm to approx. 75 X 120 cm, and some whole sheepskins. I continue with the same happiness to discover with each new piece what this world offers of diversity, softness, surprise and beauty.

I don't think I had an artistic approach, not conscious or directed. I gave myself to a powerful desire to have my hands do what I feel, through leather, which I consider to be something other than a simple material. I touched on many materials, I appreciated them all, but without ever falling in love with any of them.
It happened with leather, which is inexplicable. In the 70s, leather was rare and expensive, inaccessible to ordinary teenagers, few or no "clubs" as one could find pottery, enamels, silk painting etc.

It was therefore difficult to obtain it, without being a craftsman, without a master, and for no other reason than this powerful feeling that leather in my hands still gives me today.
The path was totally free, slow, sometimes surprising, all my "techniques" were built on mistakes, failures.
My main strength on this road was the desire to do, to try and to do again, without any other objective than the pleasure of working with leather. My other strength was not to stay long without working on it, to keep my hands and my mind in phase, to be able to engrave a line seen that one no longer sees, from memory, no longer tremble, be precise.
Over the years I have developed the capacity to please myself even more, to love the result while remaining critical and measuring the margin of progress.
The fullness that engraving and ink painting on vegetable leather gives me is probably the only style and the only approach that have ever guided me.