On his website it states that Serigo is an artist always in search of the real and that portraits especially suits this search. When you are in front of a face you are somehow in front of the real he says, though the face will only ever show you one side of it. “The face is always trying to escape you, like even now when you look at each other you see more or less our faces are trying to escape from each other like trying to hide behide the mask, behind the interview, behind a lot of kind of technological instruments so that is why I am trying to catch the real,” Serigo explains. “A painter takes in his head thousands of pictures and then he tries to make a synthetic picture of it, what he saw, so that’s why painting will be always different from a photo, in painting you will have all these synthetic parts which a painter would feel when he sees a face so ah basically it’s impossible to capture the real it will always be an interpretation of that.”
This large portrait is a memorial to any fireman who died during a fire or for any person who is involved with the idea of sacrafice. It was begun before the events of September 11th 2001 but was finished thereafter and so became a dedication to firemen, though not necessarily just the new york firefighers.
