Serban Savu

On first appearance, Serban Savu‘s meticulously rendered paintings of workers and ‘ordinary’ folk read as tender documents of the characters who reflect everyday life in the artist‘s native Romania. This arcadia is not what it seems; the ‘dreams’ Savu creates have a latent darkness informed by his personal experience of the after-effects (several generations on) of a social and political experiment devised by the communists in the 1960s to create a ‘New Man’ by forcing most of Romania‘s mostly rural population to move from their native villages to cities. The rural population did not assimilate the urban values and so emerged a hybrid category of people who colonised the peripheries in endless grey-blocked neighbourhoods while continuing to try and live as they had for centuries. Savu‘s work is far from a straightforward documentation of reality; instead it provides the viewer with a fascinating insight into a society struggling to contend with both its past and its future.