"A patient surveyor of exhibition venues such as museums and galleries. Seroux's technical mastery gives his paintings an impression of photographic reality. Today, the painter has given up anecdotes (identifiable spectators and famous works), and favours empty, almost anonymous places. A subtle tension is established in the work: do we see an identifiable, cold image, or a construction of abstract forms? 

At the end of the day, we look inside ourselves and are finally able to distinguish from all that had seemed real until then, the only possible reality: that which we invent".

X, Les images inquiétantes de Seroux, in: Le Vif l'Express, February 1998.

Séroux's appearance on the walls is relatively recent. This young Brussels painter won a competition organised by the commune of Woluwé. Amid the hodgepodge of entries that are the law of the genre, oscillating between well-worn abstraction, straightforward daubings and post-conceptual impulses, his approach to painting won the unanimous approval of the jury.

At least Séroux stands out from the crowd with his accomplished craftsmanship, painting meticulously-crafted museum interiors, highly constructed and hyper-figurative canvases where the picture rails are the pretext for strict plans whose absolute legibility obviously conceals hidden agendas. The figures who inhabit these spaces, simple visitors bent over masterpieces, are less anecdotal than they are the foils for places and cultural practices that are, all in all, rather strange.

Museums, their users, their educational facilities, painting, its power, its limits imposed by the setting but also by life, in short art in conversation, the subject, after all, is worth another. Without going so far as to say that a philosophical reflection fleshes out these spaces, it is clear that the images are seductive and that they are totally different from the hyperrealism to which we might be tempted to reduce them. Similarly, it is clear that Séroux is a true painter. In fact, nothing could be less photographic or more offbeat than these compositions, which frame frames and break down our relationship with art into neat, straight sections.

Observed through the small end of a spyglass, they do not fall into the trap of derision, but neither are they without irony, particularly with regard to constructed art, the confusion maintained between container and content, the mirror effect, they give rise to a slight vertigo that increases as the artist progresses and measures the dangers of painting that is too systematic. The nested spaces, the interlocking spaces served up by a rich palette and a real pleasure in painting, the abstract planes all contribute more and more to pushing the first degree back into the margins of a broader purpose that turns the consumers of picture rails into unrepentant dream runners.

Danièle Gillemon

Le Soir | February 1998

INTRIGUING PAINTINGS, STRANGE LOOKS? ART IN QUESTION...

This exhibition confirms not the pictorial quality of an artist for whom the very act of painting would be a poor substitute (which is totally untrue), but rather the playful, obsessive, intellectual aspect of a work that challenges the viewer to grasp its facets. And, above all, the hidden, ongoing intention of a painter who makes it his duty to involve us in paintings that are constantly being redefined from one viewer to the next. Does this painter first think about what he is painting and wants to show, before knowing how to paint it?

The question that burns in the mind of the viewer of a painting by Séroux, in which not everyone seems to be looking at the same thing or in the same direction, is this: why does he paint scenes in this way that, while not realistic, reflect a zeitgeist that fires our brains? Does he want us to position ourselves in relation to the scene described or, rather, in consideration of the visual, sensual, psychological or phenomenological surpluses that the story placed on the canvas with its unspoken words provokes? The spring air, the ambient light, the lightness of the weather, here we are in a climate conducive to scrutinising. But what is there to scrutinise?

There are thirty-six stories to be found beneath the pictorial layer, mostly in oils, of Seroux's paintings. They revisit the very history of art - the transposition of Manet, Jef Lambeaux, Ingres and Bunuel suddenly associated by close-ups and interposed female bodies, Rodney Graham, Roberto Longo, Luc Tymans. They trap random reproduction by adding tendentious, misleading, scrupulous exergues, and additions in the form of small associated paintings. And what's more, don't they amount to an indefinable, learned 'voyeurism'?

You have to go and see it, read Séroux's texts to explain what lies behind the revisited paintings, the museum scenes frozen in the moment, from one or more divergent viewpoints. You have to get involved in these images that question the human being, his desires, fantasies and loves, the art lover, his concupiscences.

Roger Pierre Turine

There's no doubt that Séroux's new way of painting 'shatters' the previous one, at least formally. In the past, it was so rigorous, with its rectangular interlocking, its figures imprisoned within the frame, that it instilled a sense of confusion and plastic fascination that depended on an infinite chain of viewers/viewed, captured off camera in their voyeuristic endeavour.

Today, we have lost this notion of abyssal perspective in favour of the fragment, the detail, the focus and the dissolution of the face. It is the real space of the gallery that frames, juxtaposing them in tight rows, these tableaus of screaming mouths, where the scream bounces off in a cascade, like a war cry. The morphology of the female faces disintegrates and twists in a diluted crimson ink, with tones of blood and living flesh.

It's always a question of surprising oneself in the face of the mystery of the coveted object, whether it's the revealed, oracular truth of the painting, or, as here, the borderline erotic experience.

But all this revolting plasticity, reminiscent of Messerschmidt's 'physiognomonic' heads, paradoxically leaves little room for confusion. We are surprised by so much pictorial overflow, and more interested in Sophie Calle's hushed, watercoloured wanderings in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, also in search of revealed truth!

Roger Pierre Turine