Los Señores del Bosque

Los Señores del Bosque
José Luis Serzo
04.27.12 – 05.31.12

Blanca Soto Gallery presents the first part of José Luis Serzo’s latest project entitled “Los Señores del
Bosque” (The Masters of the Forest), one of the most ambitious projects of the artist, not only bounded as one of his personal, bizarre and extensive series, but also which extends with a side project, curated under the subtitle “Las 1001 caras del daimon” (The 1001 Faces of the Daemon), and where Serzo, in collaboration with Gallery La Lisa (Albacete), will bring together a number or artists who, in its discretion, deal with the elusive and suggestive concept of the “daenomic”.

In this first staging of the new series, Serzo has wanted to count on the collaboration of critic José Luis Corazón Ardura, “in order to generate an intense and fun synergistic dialogue”, which allows us to explore a new way in the world of the author in the symbolism of the forest.
The project “Los Señores del Bosque” is a new series in which Blinky Rotred, alter ego of the artist and narrator of most of his stories, introduces us through a new a highly metaphorical narrative in the
fascinating world of the subconscious and its immeasurable symbolic recesses. With this new journey, Serzo shows us an elusive daemonic world, a concept of platonic inheritance, which would serve to bring together all those things that connect the real world with the imaginary. This new project aims to be a song called “alma del mundo” (soul of the world), inclusive of the Jungian collective unconscious. This unexplained of our being is, as a branch of thought that could mark a line from Plato and Hermes Trismegistus to the Pythagoreans and the Neoplatonists or to the Renaissance magicians and the alchemists passing through the Romantic poets to the same C.G. Jung, that which connects with the soul of all things of nature.

The protagonists, therefore, are some pseudo-archetypical beings, who could be daemons themselves,
since, even though they look human, much detail will lead us to place them among those beings
belonging to a collective fabulation, halfway between imagination and reality. The daemons populate
countless legends, myths, cultures and religions, serving humanity to represent certain universal
archetypes and/or purging, somehow, the oppressive thinking and the tendency toward “literalization” of all the facets of nature. This forest is inhabited by the most peculiar and hyperbolic creatures and characters, who represent, in some way, the archetypes of the subconscious of Blinky (or of the author himself, as the artist’s closest friends and carry out their own role, rescued from “another world”). Once again, as has become customary in Serzo’s work, the expositive space transforms itself into a magical container, a water pipe in the midst, where the viewer can enter into another fascinating world full of symbolism.