After graduating in 1955, he was drafted for military service, spent time in Germany and Morocco, and was sent to the front lines of the
Algerian War. Thus he experienced war both as a child and as a young soldier, and returnedpsychologically traumatized by the war in Algeria. This moral wound expressed itself in nightmares…The apocalyptic side of his [later] paintings would reflect his uneasiness and his unresolved traumas. By making fun of the most serious things, his acute sense of black humor allowed him to survive. At the end of 1957, he returned to Paris.
Pierre Seghers commissioned him to draw some thirty illustrations for
Chansons et Complaintes, a collection of poems published in 1959. That same year, he exhibited works at two Parisian galleries and at
Juan-les-Pins on the
Côte d'Azur. From 1961, he exhibited annually at the
Salon des Artistes Français. In 1962, the City of Paris purchased his painting
Un dimanche; its location is unknown. Keane painted children, and so did Serrier, sometimes from life, but Serrier’s models are usually somewhat older, though uniformly slender and with androgynous features. A gallery owner introduced Serrier to American collectors
Edgar Garbisch and his wife, Bernice Chrysler (daughter of Chrysler founder
Walter P. Chrysler), who had a particular interest in
naïve art; they commissioned a series of portraits from Serrier. The show also included work by
Moïse Kisling, and the exhibition program explicitly linked the two artists, saying that Serrier, who considered Kisling "the Master," had found his own technique, but "the same vision joins the grand Kisling to the young Serrier: plenitude of shapes, sureness of palette, precision in outlines." In the 1960s he began painting slender, young, androgynous figures in groups, set in sparse landscapes with suggestions of the surreal and sometimes wearing costumes of the
Commedia dell'arte. In some of these paintings the eyes of the figures are completely black, a motif that would continue in his later work. His daughter Françoise was born in 1962. He decided to have no more children, uncertain of his future as an artist and worried that he would have difficulty supporting a family. In 1965, he exhibited at
Forest and Reed Gallery in London. Also in 1965, he discovered the small town of
Martel, and with his old roommate Jean-Baptiste Valadié purchased a house that they opened as the gallery La Licorne (The Unicorn) in 1967. ==Surrealism and absurdist art==