The Old Pipe, 2021
Oil on board
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2025
The work of Romanian painter Șerban Savu is rife with tensions between the past and present. Savu casts a critical eye on different milestones in the history of his homeland: its transformation from a province of the Roman Empire, through the influences of Orthodox Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and, later on, the Soviet Union into state socialism, and, eventually, into a Western-style liberal democracy. Though seemingly realistic at first glance, Savu’s works in fact incorporate a critique of the historical language of Socialist Realism and its inherent propaganda. While Savu captures everyday life in motion, his images are strangely devoid of rhythm; rather, they feel almost static. Human figures in urban and rural settings appear diminished within space as they perform vague tasks, leaving one to wonder: who determines their plans and purpose? These activities seem both familiar and uncanny, evoking the paradigm of the Sisyphean task or alluding to a loss of compass or direction. Are they examples of modernisation projects following the collapse of utopias, as symbolically marked in 1989? And what visions animate them each time?
Faced with the material remnants they encounter, Savu’s human figures appear to be rather at a loss. Present promises of an abstract future progress leave them indifferent. In The Old Pipe, the dismembered sculptural figure resembles an actual victim of history. But which history is this? Savu reminds us that in our transitional, reflective present, every generation rewrites history to answer its own questions. Describing his practice, Savu notes: “I usually compose a scene from various images, using sketches, drawings, or digital image-processing software. Sometimes I use my own photographs, other times images I find from various sources.” The specific image may derive from a work scene shown on local news, but that is not what matters most. This work scene includes the old pipe, which obviously belongs to more recent history, but also the torso of a statue that refers to Greco-Roman antiquity. Although the temporalities of the old pipe and the sculptural fragment differ, the two artefacts share more in common than is immediately apparent. Would a future archaeology distinguish the former as a technical project and the latter as art? Is history itself something constructed, something one intervenes in, in the same way that one repairs an old pipe or imaginatively reconstructs a statue’s missing limbs? And is this truly a repair, or something else entirely? Under certain circumstances, might preservation become indistinguishable from destruction? The central characteristic of Șerban Savu’s work seems to be precisely this ambiguity, the difficulty of arriving at a clear interpretation: it is up to the viewer to construct a narrative.
Șerban Savu was born in 1978 in Sighișoara, Romania. He lives and works in Cluj, Romania.
