Şerban Savu

Şerban Savu’s subject is “the New Man”, the long-awaited product of communist society, created in a Stalinist ideological lab, caught in the melancholy of his daily condition of anonymity in the transition to capitalism. The distance between ideal and real loads Savu’s images with tension; he paints a world that speaks of the failure of an historical project. Initially though, Savu‘s meticulously rendered paintings of workers and ‘ordinary’ folk read as tender documents of the characters who reflect everyday life in Romania. This seduction technique is deliberate; a comment on the leitmotif of a dream of country idylls that was used as an effective device to stop generations of people losing hope entirely and rebelling. Enforced mass urbanisation ensured that much of Romania‘s rural population moved from their native villages to the peripheries of cities. What Savu‘s work reveals is the persistence of a love of nature that cannot be forcibly removed from the psyche, no matter what is enforced upon a nation; and a powerfully acute insight into a country’s struggle to come to terms with both its past and its future.