Numéro CXLII

Denis Serre was born in Rabat in 1953 to a military father, also born in Morocco in 1919 to parents from the Drôme and Ardèche regions, and a mother who arrived in Morocco at the age of 4, in 1925, from a very old family from Bordeaux. 

He was their fourth child. His three sisters preceded him by 10, 7 and 4 years. In the summer of 1958, the Serre family reluctantly left Morocco for a village in the Vaucluse on the N7, Piolenc, near Orange, followed by Tarbes two years later. Two garrison towns, followed by Lyon, where he settled much more permanently. 

He began to consider painting as his main activity after reading a book entitled "Panorama de l'art XXème siècle" in the summer of 1967 in Condrieu, where he spent the vacations with his elder sister. Three years later, he attended the municipal evening classes on rue Tronchet in Lyon, where Pierre Pelloux, an atypical painter and teacher, taught.

He attended these classes with the intention of becoming a drawing teacher for technical high schools. The following fall, he was admitted to the École Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon. But only for one year. 

Indeed, realizing the limitations of regional schools before the 1973 reform of art education, he applied for admission to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris quai Malaquai, where he was accepted at the start of the 1971/72 academic year with the best current evaluation. 

After a year of trying out two or three studios, he chose the Gustave Singier studio for its exceptional diversity of pictorial genres, and for the presence of two students from Lyon, François Jeune and Anne Legay. 

In 1976, after having produced some extremely minimalist works on paper in grape format, a violent break occurred in his life; he stopped painting for two years, thinking he had made a mistake in having chosen this path. This rupture led him to leave Paris and return, reluctantly, to live in Lyon in the autumn of 1977.