Piero Serra
drawings &
photography
luce solida | solid light
ink and pastel on A2 paper
Castelleale, Italy 2022
This is a series of drawings that explore the tension between solidity and dissolution, permanence and ephemerality. Created using materials that resist fixity and encourage disorder, the works evoke the suggestion of architectural form while remaining deliberately ambiguous. Planes of light and shadow drift across indeterminate spaces, suggesting structures that are both emerging and decaying.
My engagement with surface, material, and spatial nuance can be traced back to my early exposure to the work of my father, the painter Paolo Serra. During a particularly productive period in Castelleale, Italy, I worked in the adjacent studio while my father and his assistant painted in the next room. The quiet intensity of that environment, and my father's meticulous treatment of colour and surface, left a profound imprint on my approach here.
Luce Solida also resonates with themes from my Tranquility of Doom drawings (some of which were completed concurrently with the drawings here) which contemplates the quiet aftermath of architectural and emotional collapse. If Tranquility of Doom dwells in the ruins left behind, Luce Solida perhaps captures the threshold moment before disintegration—when stillness begins to hollow out structure, and light becomes the agent of disappearance.