“The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.”- The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard
Poetic Spaces
Sébastien Nôtre, Daniil Vasiliev, Aleksandr Gordeev.
The exhibition Poetic Spaces approaches space as an experience. Here, space unfolds as an inner structure - as something shaped by memory, the body, imagination, and personal history.
The house or the room - these familiar forms no longer function as physical coordinates. They become carriers of states and moods: solitude, desire, anxiety, fragility. In the artists’ works, space is not depicted - it is experienced together with the viewer.
The practice of Sébastien Nôtre is built through a complex process of image construction: found imagery, collage, projection, and painterly transformation. His figures — silent, often accompanied by animals - exist in unstable, almost dreamlike scenes. These spaces have no clear boundaries; they resemble fragments of memory or inner rooms where childhood, desire, and isolation intersect.
In the works of Daniil Vasiliev, space acquires a different density - it is formed through a dialogue with classical painting while simultaneously infused with the mystical and the fantastical. His scenes seem to unfold outside of time: they do not so much describe a place as create a particular atmosphere in which reality dissolves into the imaginary. Here, space becomes a medium of transition - between tradition and personal myth, between the visible and the internal.
For Aleksandr Gordeev, space emerges through objects, the body, and language. We do not see space in his works, but we clearly perceive it through objects or figures that evidently exist within it. His practice engages with vulnerability, self-perception, and communication. The body in his works is not an object in space, but a carrier of memory, an archive of lived experience. Objects in his works are fragile, unstable, constantly eluding static state.
Poetic Spaces brings together three distinct artistic approaches in which space ceases to be an external given and becomes an internal event. It unfolds as a field where the personal and the collective, the visual and the sensory, the visible and the imagined intersect.
In this sense, the exhibition proposes not so much to look at space, but to relearn how to feel it - as a form of presence in which the self takes shape.
Aleksandr Blanar
Serene Gallery, Lugano, Viale Carlo Cattaneo 17
Preview: Friday, 20th of March 17:00 - 20:00
Exhibition dates: until Saturday, 16th of May
Opening hours: Thursday-Saturday, 11:00 - 18:00, and by appointment