Șerban Savu

Șerban Savu, the artist representing Romania this year, will present an arrangement of around 40 paintings that contend with the concept of work and its obverse, rest. Ciprian Mureșan will curate the pavilion, which expands beyond the Giardini to include events staged elsewhere.

A sextet of artists will represent Zimbabwe this time around, in a pavilion called “Undone”: Gillian Rosselli, Kombo Chapfika, Moffat Takadiwa, Sekai Machache, Troy Makaza, and Victor Nyakauru. Fadzai Veronica Muchemwawill curate.

In a gallery of the Romanian cultural institute in Venice, the artist will direct a team of mosaic artists from the arts schools in Iaşi in his home country and in Chişinau, Moldova, in creating a mosaic of a picnic scene over the seven months that the Venice Biennale runs. 

Born in 1978, and educated in Cluj-Napoca from 1996-2001, Serban Savu is one of the better-known representatives of recent Romanian art, as well as arguably among the most talented. Savu’s impressive figuration blinds us to various manipulations. His technique of isolating figures within wide expanses of land or cityscape creates dramatic compositions powerfully at odds with the mundanity of his subject matter. In a continual elision of past and present, he transforms all manifestations of the utilitarian and ordinary into moments that surpass the sum of their parts.

Serban Savu's painting is a realistic painting, it describes a sociological context and a moment in history. That is why it could pass for descriptive. However, if the manner evokes socialist realism through its simplified and "cubo-naive" characters, one cannot shy away from a powerful feeling of unreality in front of the scenes suffused with an iridescent light that the painter gives to each of his paintings.

Romanian artist Șerban Savu was born in 1978, but he’s clearly what one might call an old soul, demonstrating both a precocious confidence in his eccentrically mature vision and a taste for meta-narrative and boundary-blurring in both style and content in an intellectually rigorous mashup that reflects his generation’s brand of slacker surrealism and an embrace of hybridity for its own sake. Recombinance is a hallmark of today’s visual culture. 

Serban Savu’s work interprets the impact of historic Imperialism, recent Communism and uncertain futures in succinct and playful snapshots of his everyday. Set in dusk-struck landscapes, his paintings narrate austere interactions in concrete dominated nature. Nice and jolly.

"I like to follow what Leonardo said: 'Pittura e una cosa mentale' (painting is a mental occupation). In my case, everything starts with an idea, then I do my own photographic research. Afterwards, I feel like a puppeteer when I play in Photoshop to ‘order’ the composition by moving the characters around. In the end, the ‘preparatory drawing’ looks more like a collage. After I do all these boring preparations, painting comes as a relief."