Matt Nino

            The opening night for the show “Our Influences” at Serpentine Gallery was pretty exquisite. There were a lot of captivating paintings, drawings, jewelry, and hand built ceramics works.  Belle Hollon’s work struck me as very playful and very loose. I really like the fact that she used strong red grounds to paint over because it helped break apart the usual white of the canvas that shows through on a lot of pieces. Her subject focused mainly on depicting scenes from nature and small rural areas of New Mexico. She had a lot of strong greens and blues amongst many other colors that all worked together very nicely.

The work of John Baker is something that I had never really seen before. He approached things with a ceramic mindset, but instead of using clay or wax he used hand made paper – it reminded me of an advanced style of paper mache. They had really interesting texture and the paper was handled in a very clean and professional way that I would have never thought of.

Gus Sermas’s work specifically caught my eye because in his drawing classes he always emphasized the use of geometric shapes when approaching the composition of the human figure. His use of color in his paintings was also phenomenal, which makes perfect sense because he really knew theory when he taught us color and design. He approached the figure in a very unusual way that not many people understand fully and I thought that was very unique. They were very geometric and fractured figures that were put into environments where the surrounding objects were handled in the same way; which is a great compositional choice because it brings the pieces together not in a singular sense but as a set. The size of his paintings and drawings also worked really well with his compositions.