David Aiu Servan-Schreiber’s creative path started in the streets of France within the field of collaborative graffiti practices. His taste for public self-expression, words with meaning, and calligraphy was shaped at that point. However, life-changing circumstances later pushed him in another artistic direction. A self-taught painter, in 2012 Servan-Schreiber relinquished street walls in favor of canvases. In tune with his core beliefs and gut instincts, David Aiu Servan-Schreiber’s artistic route seems to be punctuated by serendipity. Following what life was throwing at him, his time working at an auction house was his “art school”, the way in which he was able to “train his eye”. 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, and uncertainties—Servan-Schreiber turned to the reliability of science and found solace in the undeniable: planets and life on earth. This spiritual quest for scientific facts lead him to renew his visual language where aesthetics could become an entry point to trigger conversations about our environment and fragile ecosystems. Inspired by earth’s greatest struggles such as deforestation or climate change, Servan-Schreiber’s practice borrows from nature’s elements: earth, water, air, and fire. If these elements encapsulate nature’s most complex matters and the universe’s cosmology, they also quite literally shape his practice, using, in turn, an air compressor to guide flames, an air gun to spray pigments and always using wood as the base of his work. His “earth-paintings” are influenced by scientists and as such organised in “families”: coupling the most intimate with the most methodic. Duality and opposition are a recurring motif of Servan-Schreiber’s art: at the crossroads of figuration and abstraction, in a process of both destruction and creation, life’s intricacies are at the center of his thinking and form. Gold leaves bring life and light to Servan-Schreiber’s other-worldly and ominous considerations as a healing process and way of maintaining hope.