Pierre Sernet (b. Paris, 1951) is a French photographer and performance artist. He studied art in Paris at the Ateliers du Carrousel du Musée du Louvre. After having worked in photography for several of years, he moved to the United States in his early twenties, pursuing a number of business ventures, including the creation of the first— and what was to become the largest— fine arts database in the world, Artnet. Since returning to art-making at the end of the 1990’s, he has performed and exhibited in major galleries and museums across United States and abroad. For more than a decade (2002-2014), he held “Guerilla Tea” ceremonies in twenty-three countries around the world, inviting randomly selected guests to share a bowl of tea in their environment, housed under the conceptual space of a brass cube. He is based in Kamakura, Japan.
Sernet’s practice is the multifaceted approach of a single concept: demonstrating through different series of images, the similarity of human expression across cultural differences, of which his most recent series’, Synonyms and Face are excellent examples.
Synonyms shows how the human form when shot either alone, or coupled in lovemaking, can become an abstract flow, irrespective of the model’s gender or ethnicity. Shot through scrims the subjects become silhouetted shadows where only the piece’s title allows us to guess the sex, cultural background or nationality of the bodies involved. One ceases making the difference between body and entity, emptiness and fullness, only following the contoured spaces melding into one another, like the waxing and waning figures of a lava lamp.
His Face series explores cultural differences and similarities by looking at individual faces around the world in an unexpected way. Instead of photographing the human subject directly, he utilizes the ultimate representation of Man around the world and throughout history, sculptures of Man by Man.
Through the use of photography, my aim is to create different series of artworks that show that although people around the world may appear to be very different, they are in fact very similar and therefore, we should be more accepting of other people, cultures and lifestyles.
