David aiu Servan-Schreiber

A self-taught painter, David aiu Servan-Schreiber’s creative path started on the streets of France, within the field of collaborative graffiti. His taste for public self-expression, words with meaning, and calligraphy, was shaped at this point. However, life-changing circumstances later took him in another artistic direction, leading him to abandon the walls of the street for the canvas. In tune with his core beliefs, David Aiu Servan-Schreiber’s artistic route is punctuated by serendipity. Throughout his life, whatever the challenges, he always found a way to dedicate time and space to his practice — once turning a garage into a makeshift studio.

Tormented by life’s greatest challenges — desperation, death, uncertainty — Servan-Schreiber turned to the reliability of science, finding solace in the undeniable: the universe we all live in. This spiritual quest for scientific facts led him to renew his visual language, where aesthetics became an entry point to start conversations around the environment and fragile ecosystems. Taking inspiration from the earth’s greatest struggles, such as deforestation or climate change, Servan-Schreiber’s practice uses nature’s elements: earth, water, air, and fire. If these elements encapsulate nature’s most complex matters and the universe’s cosmology, they also shape his practice. Using wood as the base of his work, the artist uses an air compressor to guide flames and an air gun to spray pigments.

The Planets series, created from 2018 to present, is influenced by various scientists and is organised into “families”: coupling the most intimate with the most methodic, such as the sub-series within Planets, Roani, after the Brazilian Environmentalist Raoni Metuktire, which looks at the devastation of the earth caused by human impact. Appearing partly destroyed compared to the rest of the Planet series, as a result of the artist using fire on the canvas, the Roani plays upon issues such as deforestation, as seen in Aidone, 2020, and Nissoria, 2020. This theme of human destruction upon the earth is explored more broadly in Microcosm, which casts the earth as a barren landscape, sparse and scorched, ultimately related to desertification. Yet the artist’s compositions are not pessimistic; rather they encourage us to consider the damage to earth thus far and work towards caring for the very thing which provides us with life.

Servan-Schreiber’s works are at their core reflective pieces – they tempt the viewer to slow down and enter into a state of contemplation. At the crossroads of figuration and abstraction, in a process of both destruction and creation, life’s intricacies are at the centre of Servan-Schreiber’s thinking and form.