Serge Onnen

Artist Statement

Like everybody, I made drawings before I knew about art, before I new how to write, before I knew how to speak. That is something that should always be kept in mind.

I will limit myself within a certain subject, but that subject is not the theme. By this I mean, when I draw hands, I am not interested in sign-language or palm reading. The hand will have something else to do.

I want to use drawing in more ways than just on paper. There’s nothing wrong with drawings on paper.

By using loops for my animation videos, the repetitional aspect of the piece can replace the narrative aspect of moving images.

I bring drawing, animation, film, video and wallpaper together around a central theme and put drawing in a wider perceptive by initiating all kinds of projects, such as my ongoing book project Drawings on… (aka Volume).

Photography stopped everyday drawing. The computer stopped everyday writing.

By using wallpaper and it’s repetitional aspect I can intensify the experience of a small drawing.

The power of animation is that the unbelievable and impossible is normal. Someone falls from a building and just walks away. Violence in animation doesn’t hurt.

Also, the speed a drawing can have—you get a different meaning when you get to see 15 drawings per second.

I would rather do nothing, if I had the courage.

I make art to get rid of it.

In my opinion drawing is universal in the sense that everybody has made a drawing at one time, while not everybody has made a photograph, painting or film.

Drawing is cheap.

• issue #17: "Sanitary Park"
• issue #22: "Insurance Value Drawings"

Curator Statement

Serge Onnen is a serial drawer. He draws continually, with a constant fervor that makes everything he does drawing. He studies and collects drawings, he curates drawings, he decorates with drawings, he makes videos/movies with drawings, he orchestrates music with drawings. Everything he does is about drawings. His installation in the Dikeou Collection transforms the restroom into a room of his figures whose hands to mouth pattern quilts the walls of the room making it a variable pincushion of fleshy figures. Emerging from the landscape of drawn wallpaper, is a video of his drawings Break in which the two hands keep clanking together various objects like beer mugs, until they break apart and fall to the ground. This drawing environment is just part of the whole Onnen drawing retinue which includes his book “0” a collection of drawings he compiled of both contemporary artists, and historical masters, for zingmagazine 16, and his musical “exquisite corpse” drawing game in which he gives instructions to readers on how to make a musical composition, then asks them to record it and send it back to zing for compilation and publication.