Art Matters | A Medieval Romanian City With Major Art Talent
by Zeke Turner
Lacking a famous art school, government support or even a location most people can point to on a map, the small medieval city of Cluj, Romania, has become an unlikely breeding ground for the next generation of art stars. Two years ago, the painter Adrian Ghenie was in his friend’s studio, having a coffee with some former classmates — all Romanian artists and gallerists in their mid-to-late 30s — when it sunk in: they had made it.
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Inside the mind of Serban Savu
Figurative painter Serban Savu's skilfully rendered canvases capture the daily existence of contemporary Romanians at work and leisure. Savu treats his protagonists’ facial characteristics in a generic manner, causing their individual identities to remain elusive. Interior scenes depict people unaware of our gaze and absorbed in their own worlds, viewed through glass and embedded in compositions governed by architectural features. Exterior rural landscapes often portray solitary figures in the middle-distance, isolated and overwhelmed. The result is a series of poignant, observational 'snapshots' that obliquely reveal the psyche of the ‘ordinary’ Romanian as the country experiences political change and economic growth.
Serban Savu
By Lloyd Wise
Şerban Savu belongs to a loose-knit group of young Romanian painters based in Cluj-Napoca, a Transylvanian college town some eighty miles from Hungary. His subject is blue-collar work and leisure in contemporary Romania, and he portrays this quotidian reality with cool, masterly restraint. This focus draws on a range of precedents, from Bruegel to Millet—whom he has directly and indirectly invoked. But I always think of Edward Hopper. Like Hopper’s nighthawks and lonely women, Savu’s brick-factory workers and roadside bathers are kept at a strange distance, their bodies frozen in a melancholic stasis. Speaking of his painting Office at Night, 1940, Hopper said, “I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended.” Savu, too, tends to keep narrative sense at bay.
across a sunlit parking lot. And a raft occupied by nine figures is titled simply Bulgaria.
Artist to Wach
Realist painter, Serban Savu, was born in 1978 in Sighisoara, Romania. He attended the University of Art and Design in Cluj, Romania (2001), after which he was awarded a two-year postgraduate research grant to Venice. He returned to Cluj, where he continues to live and paint. He is one of the (if not the) most well-known Contemporary Romanian artists, and in the opinion of The Art Economist editorial staff, the most talented. As has been remarked in reviews of his work, surprisingly, he was 11 when the Communist dictator fled Romania and the government changed. Savu’s subject matter is filled with Communist-era architecture, way of life and the feeling of wanting. The skies are gray and the atmosphere dismal in a bleak landscape. The figures are disengaged, seemingly suffering and anonymous. The social overtones make Savu’s paintings an obvious heir to the early twentieth-century Social Realists in Europe and the U.S. He paints the Romania of today, which appears to be not all that much different than the Communist version that fell in 1989. The post-industrial narratives feature Romanian urban life—men doing manual labor, a group waiting by the side of a road and unsuccessful fishermen. All works are oil on canvas and range in size from 7 x 11 inches to 4 x 6 feet.
The Edge of the Empire
By Nick Obourn
Within Eastern Europe, Romania was one of the last Communist strongholds. On December 22, 1989, its dictatorial leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, fled protesting citizens at the Central Committee building by helicopter, only to be captured and executed alongside his wife three days later. Serban Savu, the young Romanian painter who had his first New York solo exhibition at David Nolan's Chelsea location, was 11 years old at the time, yet his paintings project a mature and quietly unnerving vision of Communism's vestigial influence on contemporary Romanians.
The Edge of the Empire
By Holland Cotter
The Romanian artist Serban Savu, who was born in 1978 and lives in Cluj in Transylvania, made his New York debut with a single small, gray, silent-feeling painting of huddled figures at the Armory Show in 2007. That same year he stood out in a group show of young Romanian artists at David Nolan Gallery, then in SoHo, and now Nolan is giving him a solo show of 14 paintings in which the sense of overcast soundlessness persists.
The Edge of the Empire
By Adina Popescu
Based in Cluj, the painter Serban Savu is one of the most interesting artists to emerge from post-Communist Romania. His paintings depict vast postindustrial landscapes in which people walk around, swim, and engage in everyday activities. His titles, such as Early Days of Summer (all works 2008) and The Traveler, recall Romantic motifs. Although the titles suggest landscapes in which people might feel safe and at one with nature, this is by no means the case in the paintings. Genre Scene and Mountain of Nostalgia depict concrete ruins and junkyards. In another work, an enormous industrial highway overpass casts a shadow on a figure trying to sunbathe.
The Edge of the Empire
By Greg Lindquist
Serban Savu paints the Romanian landscape, a topography where man lounges in nature amid the remaining manifestations of the Communist era. In depicting what is stereotypically perceived in terms of a diametric relationship between man and nature, Savu's portrayal of these forces takes its cue from Romanticism. The distinctions are less clear: nature is not natural—flora, fauna, terrain—but rather evokes man's presence, in such forms as industrial structures, heaps of industrial materials and the visible atmospheric results of industrial processes. If Romanticism involves a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities, then Savu's 21st century rendition reinvestigates this concern, imbuing these vistas with a subtle and wry nostalgia for a more economically prosperous time when Communism brought more stable employment.
Across the Trees: Romanian Art Now
By Holland Cotter
The spare, grave display by the Romanian gallery Plan B was a standout at the recent Armory Show. Everything looked like eye candy beside it. Several of those artists are also in "Across the Trees" — a literal translation of Transylvania — at Nolan, organized by the Britsh art critic Jane Neal. Their work is as taciturn and compact as remembered, but with a vein of flipped-on-its-head zaniness shooting through.
Pencil drawings by Ciprian Muresan turn an Italian fable into a surrealistic sitcom of patriarchal warfare, with a hapless parent tormented by preadolescent children. Miklos Szilard's sculpture called "Father" could be straight from the story: It's a man's beat-up winter cap with a bloody bandage on top.
Across the Trees: Romanian Art Now
Title aside ("Across the Trees" is a literal translation of "Transylvania"), this tight survey of contemporary Romanian art feels anything but bucolic. Black humor rules, as in Miklos Szilard's assemblage—a fur hat crowned by a bloody bandage and called "Father." Gabriela Vanga gets at the absurdity of reflexive violence with a "Tom and Jerry" segment from which the goading, clever mouse has been digitally erased, so that the poor, bumbling cat tortures himself. Cristian Pogăcean also contributes appropriationist animation, with the finger in Caravaggio's "Doubting Thomas" allowed to actively and surreally probe the wound. Serban Savu, Adrian Ghenie, and Ciprian Mureşan's bleak, dense little paintings and drawings round out the show.