TOM WESSELMANN

Almine Rech Paris, Matignon is pleased to present Monica with Wesselmann, Tom Wesselmann's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, organized in conjunction with the Estate of Tom Wesselmann.

June 7 - July 20, 2024

We don’t hear from artists’ models often enough. Yet their accounts are valuable, like the one offered today by Monica Serra, who was Tom Wesselmann’s model from 1982 until the end of his career in 2004. She was much younger than he when they met at an exhibition of the Standing Still Lifes at the Sydney Janis Gallery.

Monica’s account teaches us something important in this regard: that we are in the presence of an experience that belongs to another register and goes beyond the triviality of a man looking at a nude woman. We understand here that Monica is not only a model, but also an assistant, and, even more, a collaborator and close friend of the artist. She describes the studio and her posing sessions. Her words are precise and thoughtful.

Although we’re in New York, in a loft on the Bowery, she describes a traditional studio practice that has been repeated for generations by Western painters. Basically, there’s nothing out of the ordinary, except that the eroticism and its visual language explored by Wesselmann’s painting are light-years away from what Monica explains to us.

From her point of view, the experience, what happens in reality, is something sacred, supernatural, as if the painter and his model, and the whole small theater of creativity that this scene suggests, entered a different space together to which she gives no location, no name. But we understand that it is simply the space of Painting, with a capital P: no longer a reality but the evocation of an ideal.

“Tom was very clever as well as creative. He was excited and itching to incorporate his new idea – the development of the laser cut metal pieces. Something about me matched the process. He was already testing this new medium when I arrived on the scene. His wife and favorite model, Claire, was busy raising their children, so Tom was using various other models after her.

My real work came when he later asked me to model nude. I was reluctant at first, since we had become friends, so that seemed tricky, but I decided it might be a good job, one that I already knew how to do, and it could fuel my own creativity.” - Monica Serra