The Architectural Works of Serge Charchoune

Rosenberg & Co.
Jul 13, 2023 6:59PM

Serge Charchoune (1888–1975) was a Russian-born, French painter known for his mercurial style that spanned the breadth of European modernism. Rosenberg & Co. is pleased to present Serge Charchoune: The Early Years, the first posthumous solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York.

Throughout his career, Serge Charchoune experimented with the milieu of avant-garde artistic movements of the in early 20th-century Europe. In the latter half of the 1920s, Charchoune became inspired by Purism—a movement created by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier during the inter-war period, which was defined by the simplification and modulation of forms—and quickly developed an adaptation of the style. Charchoune continued to evolve his work under the Purist tenets in the following years, utilizing a series of techniques, such as contrasting textures, to reinvigorate the movement's flattened forms.

Serge Charchoune
La maison d'en face, 1928
Rosenberg & Co.

In 1928, Charchoune's continued reinventions of the style resulted in a series of Purist adjacent constructions of an architectural nature. Charchoune's architectural paintings remarkably expanded on Purism's mechanical standardization of forms, while simultaneously engaging the organic world. In the painting La maison d'en face, from1928, Charchoune reconstructs the image of a house in a manner comparable to flat-packed furniture. The cerebration behind the planarity of these works is best described by artist and scholar Merlin James, "Charchoune is not so much depicting the world as conjecturing it, conjuring it up. Painting is itself a kind of construction work, he seems to say, just as a building is a kind of composition."

Serge Charchoune
L'arbre, 1928
Rosenberg & Co.
Serge Charchoune
Paysage, 1928
Rosenberg & Co.

Within the Purist movement, artists sought to acknowledge the occurring industrialization by adapting mechanic subject matter into classical forms with simplified shapes. In his architectural series, however, Charchoune utilized Purism's simplification of shapes to mechanically re-envision organic objects, creating a complementary and singular expansion upon the Purist's ideas.

Charchoune's re-imaginations of the natural world are exemplified in the paintings L'arbre andPaysage. Both created in 1928, the two compositions portray natural elements—a tree and a landscape—in geometric simplification. The painting's abstracted forms are suspended on blank backgrounds and connected by narrow lines, akin to the two-dimensionality of architectural blueprints. Through this angularity, Charchoune's architectural constructions uniquely re-conceptualized the Purist expressions of industrialization.

Installation view, Rosenberg & Co.

In the years following 1928, Charchoune continued to cultivate his personal artistic style, creating several experimental series that would notably precede post-war techniques of art making. Charchoune's architectural compositions are a demonstration of the artist's inventiveness and a testament to his remarkable prescience.

Serge Charchoune: The Early Years is on view through July 14, 2023 at Rosenberg & Co., New York. To learn more about the artist, click here.

Rosenberg & Co.