July 29 to November 5, 2012
11 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, www.moma.org

Jens S. Jensen, Boy on the Wall, Hammarkullen, Gothenburg, 1973. Photograph of Michael (age 9). Gelatin silver print, 9-1/2 x 11-3/4 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jens S. Jensen, 2012

Arriving expectantly at the sixth floor atrium of MOMA, prodded by a mad crush of child-loving visitors of all ages and nationalities, you are met by the blow-up of an original gelatin silver print (Boy on Wall, Hammarkullen by Jens S. Jensen, 1973).  From a massive face of concrete blocks a child dangles, eerily hanging by his right arm, more than a body’s height above the ground.  Is it a boy or a girl?  The figure wears a leather jacket, or possibly that’s a quilted fabric, hard to tell, and the frowzy blond Christopher Robin haircut might signal either gender.  What about the smile? Not an exhibitionistic grin, as in “Hey, everybody!  Look what I can do!” Just a glance, acknowledging your arrival: “Oh, it’s you,” as if being suspended by one hand high above the earth were the most natural way in the world to greet someone.  No bravado, no fear of falling.  The perplexities of this uncanny image epitomize the show.  As you stare at it, you experience dysphoria, weightlessness, a fleeting sense of levitation, and you may even recoup your own childhood wish to float above the ground.  For the boy (it is, we read, a boy, named Michael, aged nine) actually seems to be suspended in front of the wall, not securely attached to it.  Is this an illusion, or not?

What, this image makes you wonder, will this exhibit on The Century of the Child have to do with flesh and blood children, pace its title? Who or what is the child?  What does it mean to design for the child?  What are the ethics of such an enterprise?  Presuming overall a rather bland and benign notion of childhood (think of Locke’s tabula rasa), the show withdraws for the most part from messy engagements with actual children.  Children float suspended and detached from what is presented: like the figure in the Swedish photograph, the work on view in these MOMA galleries bypasses emotion (with some notable exceptions, including film footage related to the 1940s work of Bauhaus-trained designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis with children in the Terezín concentration camp near Prague, and Polish director Andrzej Wolski’s 2011 film, Toys, that features Warsaw children scrounging in the rubble after World War II).  Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing.  The distance off the ground, so to speak, can be disconcerting.

Indeed, what this ample, richly crowded, and perhaps unintentionally provocative seven-room exhibition reveals—in spite of itself— is a thoroughgoing exposé, decade after decade, of nearly unbroken top-down efforts to use, exploit, and control as well as engage children, sometimes by imitating them, occasionally by mocking them, all the while subsuming them under whatever artistic style, political agenda, or commercial opportunity happens to be ascendant.  No major effort has been taken by the otherwise remarkably diligent curators to do more than show this. How have the successive waves of stylized objects on display—toys, furniture, books, clothing, as well as imagery, shifting educational practices, and spatial arrangements actually impacted the children exposed to them?  A visitor seeks in vain for critique and evaluation—for any report on the later effects of all this adult-perpetrated design on youth.  Few questions are aired.   A typical text panel reads:  “In such rooms, it was felt, children’s spontaneity and pleasure in learning would flourish.”   But why was that felt?  And by whom?  And was this feeling ever put to a test?

Joaquín Torres-García, painted wood figures, interchangeable pieces, dimensions vary, c. 1925. Daniela Chappard Foundation. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Spain

Walking from room to room, you are struck by the way the putative child, objectified despite protestations to the contrary, has been incorporated into period style, the vector being culture > child, not the reverse: the Arts & Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Futurism, De Stijl,  Pop Art, digital art.  Despite claims that artists’ approaches were rooted in desires to understand children, you may come away feeling that, if the twentieth century is indeed The Century of the Child, surely that child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.

A Gargantuan wooden table with a climbable oversized chair and step stool offer adults who try them out a bodily take on children’s experience.  Mugging visitors pose on them for photo ops, while uniformed security personnel control access by ordering people brusquely to form a queue.  For one split second, I clamber up on the chair and, when the tabletop reaches barely to my nose, my bygone helplessness and marginalization as a child rush back in a flood:  I am Gulliver in Brobdingnag until an officious guard whisks me away: “You can’t spend any time here,” he admonishes sternly; now, I truly am a child.

Visitors chuckle and guffaw at wall-mounted black and white 1927 footage of a three or four-year-old who steers his kiddie-motor wheel of fanciful circular design along an empty road.   His father, in fedora, tie, and three-piece suit, chases him dutifully, unable to keep up as the child and his mini-vehicle careen along a wide unpopulated avenue in zigzag swaths, as if illustrating the line from Isaiah 11 (“the little child shall lead them”) or Wordsworth’s similar sentiment from the Rainbow poem of 1802.  Throughout the exhibit, which is thronged morning and afternoon, spectators seem euphoric, entranced by images such as this.  They appear bemused and nostalgic, while their children respond especially to movement for, as Fénelon wisely wrote, children are happiest when their bodies are in motion, when they can change position.

Late in the show, you come upon a striking work that chimes with the Jensen photograph you met at the start:  Paul Rand, in 1996, shortly before his death, composes a flat black child, upside down, arms akimbo, balancing precariously on a slanting tightrope made of words.  The great designer fills in the body with saucy details from Breughel’s Children’s Games (1560) to create an indelible poster in support of a village devoted to orphaned and abandoned children.

Aesthetically, top prize belongs to The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an exquisite dreamlike shadow film by Berlin artist Lotte Reiniger (1923-25) that plays silently in a gallery labeled “Avant Garde Play Time.” Possibly the earliest surviving animated film, this gossamer confection was painstakingly made by hand, its style inspired by finger puppets, embroidery, and lace making.  Reiniger, who invented her own techniques, created this masterpiece by scissor work, intricately cutting out characters of astonishingly delicate beauty, which, in an evanescent world, sway, prance, bow, and embrace while enacting stories of intrigue, romance, and suspense drawn from the Arabian Nights.  Reiniger’s villain, a wicked enchanter known as the African Magician, appears maleficently in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.  To stand spellbound watching as these silhouetted tales unfurl their sinister plots and metamorphoses in ever-swirling motion until Prince Achmed is at last reunited with his slender fairy Peri Banou, is to recapture a childhood in which magic is real and flying demons are more true than anything attached to solid earth.

This thought returns us to the elevated image with which we began — the photographed child in the air— and leads me to conclude that, if real children are to be found in this show, they must be summoned, like genii, from encounters with whatever designed objects move us most, for there is, after all, no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked.  Perhaps that is as close as we will ever come to the angel with the flaming sword who guards the way back, as Ernst Gombrich wrote famously once in his essay on the hobby horse.

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Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Marian Goodman Gallery
October 25 to December 3, 2011
24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, New York City, 212-977-7160

Fernando Botero, Entombment of Christ/ Entierro de Cristo, 2010. Oil on canvas, 59 x 79 7/8 inches. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York

No one ridicules racial minorities, the blind or disabled people. But fat men and women are often the subject of jokes.  That shows a class bias. The grander the restaurant, the smaller the portions of food: and so most privileged people are slim. Until recently Fernando Botero who, like Thomas Kinkaid and Leroy Neiman is very successful commercially, was not taken seriously within the art world. It was easy to ridicule his signature style short fat people, often shown in take offs from old master paintings such as Olympia and Las Meninas. But in 2005, when few artists were able to translate their leftist politics into art, his Abu Ghraib series made him a figure worth reckoning within the art world.

In Precious (2009), Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe brilliantly plays an overweight teenager. We see such African-American girls, and so can accept that casting. The Gospels don’t tell Christ’s weight, but since in pre-modern cultures poor people were malnourished, it’s hard to imagine that he was fat. Botero is a gifted painter. Jesus and the Crowd (2010) shows Christ surrounded by a mob in modern dress; The Way of Sorrows (2010), presents him being beaten by a police officer in modern dress; and Jesus Nailed to the Cross (2011) depicts a soldier nailing his right foot to the cross. But in the end I was reminded, fatally, of an exhibition of crucifixions several decades ago also on 57^th street in which Keith Haring depicted Donald Duck crucified. Botero’s Christ in Entombment of Christ (2010) is a powerful image, painted with great feeling. And his admirable Crucifixion (2011) sets that scene in a park within a modern city. Like the Renaissance masters who depicted Christ and his disciplines as contemporary Italians, Botero recognizes that unless the New Testament scenes are presented in the present, sacred Christian art is dead. When Titian shows Christ as a handsome Venetian, his paintings come off. Christ was a Middle-Eastern Jew, not a Venetian, but Titian’s fiction works. But Christ could not be plump- that’s my unreflective prejudice; and so Botero’s fiction, setting Christ’s passion in the contemporary world does not fly.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Annunciation (2010), a thirty-three minute video uses three projected images to present the Annunciation.  An angel wearing wings, who is lifted aloft held by a harness, confronts a young actress playing the Virgin.  I don’t understand the idea, prominently cited in the gallery’s publicity, that living beings’ different worlds exist simultaneously.

We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world.  (Jakob von Uexküll, A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men (1957))

But I can see that Ahtila’s fiction works, for in this scene staged in her Finnish studio the Annunciation comes alive.

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The Land of Light and Promise: 50 Years Painting Jerusalem and Beyond. Ludwig Blum 1891-1974 at the Museum of Biblical Art
October 23, 2011- January 15, 2012
1865 Broadway at 61st Street, New York City, 212-408-1500

Ludwig Blum, Temple Mount and the Western Wall?, 1943?. Oil on canvas?, 32 x 46 cm. ?Private Collection. Courtesy of the Museum of the Biblical Image, New York

According to Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) inaugurated a post-historical period, in which everything was possible. The Land of Light and Promise: 50 Years Painting Jerusalem and Beyond. Ludwig Blum 1891-1974 at the Museum of Biblical Art, shows that our pluralistic period started somewhat earlier. The Metropolitan’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, posted on their web site demonstrates that 1949 was a good year for painting, for Barnett Newman’s Concord, Max Beckmann’s Beginning and Willem de Kooning’s classic Black Untitled have entered the collection. As if in a parallel universe, Ludwig Blum,  (1891-1974), a Czech of Jewish origin who moved to Palestine in 1923 painted Jerusalem, View from Mount Scopus. His son was killed fighting; some of his paintings show the results of the battles, which made Israel independent.  But this picture, which has more in common with Bernardo Bellotto’s eighteenth-century cityscapes than the paintings by Newman, Beckmann or de Kooning shows Jerusalem looking peaceful. The Dome of the Rock is on the left, the black roof of Dormition Church near the center and the yellow-roofed Rockefeller Museum of Archaeology on the right edge. By presenting this show, originally organized by the Ben Uri, London’s Jewish Art Museum, an American Protestant institution provides an invaluable portrait of Christian, Islamic and Jewish culture in Blum’s adopted country.

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The first stain paintings of mine that had hard-edge bands on the bottom all generate from the late summer of 1969. The bands served three major purposes for the meaning and expression of my paintings at the time.

I was invited to have my first one-man show at the new David Whitney Gallery at 53 E. 19th Street in Manhattan in October 1969. The inaugural exhibition at the gallery in September 1969 was a group show and mine was to be the first one-man show.

Ronnie Landfield, Sunday Afternoon, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 168 inches. Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christie

In August 1969 after returning to New York City from a trip to California I painted ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’, 108 x 168 inches – a stained landscape with thick, and free-wheeling abstract pours of opaque, linear, colors, thrown across the main body of stained abstract landscape and a wide yellow band across the bottom of the painting. In the yellow band I splattered and splashed acrylic paint so as to create a kind of abstract calligraphy in the band. The painting in now in the permanent collection of the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christie.

Prior to my trip to California that July I had made a major series of ‘’Pour’’ paintings and ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’ was initially a continuation of that series. However as I contemplated the state of painting, the state of the world and my sense of what it was that I wanted to say as an artist; I saw ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’ as the beginning of something radically new and in my own voice as an artist.
One of the paintings that immediately followed was ‘’Diamond Lake’’, 108 x 168 inches. ‘’Diamond Lake’’ redefined the art of painting.

That painting is a stained landscape with a hard-edge violet band across the bottom and soft and pale stained colors across the top. The top reads as sky, the stained mid-section in the body reads as landscape and the violet band at the bottom serves a threefold function.

In response to the criticism lodged by Donald Judd that painting was dead because it was illusionistic and was a lie because it didn’t own up to its objecthood; I decided to move the art of painting forward by re-defining it via its own past. By creating new paintings that were illusionistic, pictorial and anti-object. In response as well to the demand by Clement Greenberg that painting be unified, – one thing – one way – I was determined to create a new type of painting that was in keeping with my view of my generation incorporating several philosophies of art-making into my paintings at once. A simile in music might be folk-rock; or the separate sections in a song like ‘’Hey Jude’’.

Moving forward by looking backward. Consequently I distilled my new work beginning with ‘’Diamond Lake’’ into foreground – middle ground – and background sections. The hard-edge bands serving as foregrounds. Initially they were particularly high – almost taking up the bottom third of the picture. The purpose was to project out to the viewer, creating a literal foreground. While the main stained body drew the viewer in with multiple layers of thinned colors, and the sky at the top evoking infinite space.

By aggressively creating physically powerful, cutting edge, abstract paintings that evoked nature – landscape – and foreground, middle ground and background, I was sending a message to artists and art lovers alike in contradiction of Judd’s dictums.

By combining hard-edge areas with stained areas I was directly addressing Greenberg’s proscribed limitations by essentially changing the priorities of picture making to express and evoke the sometimes contradictory truths of modern life as I perceived it.

The second and perhaps more important underlying meaning of the hard-edge bands in my paintings was the necessity to express the truth of life. The landscape, stained sections of my paintings evoke nature, freedom, wilderness, and the bands include the man-made element that defines our lives in today’s world. Architecture, roads, buildings against nature, telephone lines, electric poles, set against the virtual lack of true wilderness in today’s world. Even as we drift from canyon to canyon as I used to do in the wilderness of Utah and other places we are proscribed in our lives with appointments and responsibilities, and limits – the bands are metaphors for that essential truth of our lives…

Ronnie Landfield, Diamond Lake, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 168 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson

The final meaning of my use of the hard-edge bands was perhaps the most important, certainly one of the most important aspects of my work. I am an admirer of American abstract expressionism, characterized by large scale, aggressive, brash, and matter of fact, in your eye, surfaces and color. Perhaps those descriptive elements defined some of American culture in the late 1960s and 1970s. I am also an admirer of the history of art.

We were engaged in war in Southeast Asia, and I opposed that war. I was opposed to our aggression against a small, helpless country like Vietnam and throughout that region of the world. My stained landscapes have their roots in Song Dynasty Chinese Landscape painting, characterized by flatness and the depiction of a wide range of terrain at once. Song Dynasty Landscape painting is the beginning of all landscape painting pre-dating the art of the west by a couple of centuries. A visual characteristic of Chinese landscape is the presence of geometric chops, adding the calligraphic signature of the artist as well as calligraphic written poetry; often those paintings on silk were bordered on both sides. The colors and subtlety of those Chinese landscape paintings were stained into the silk fabric reminiscent of the subtlety and color of stain paintings.
My bands are my version of those artist chops. The size and scale of my paintings being aggressive, and evocative of abstract expressionism. Hofmann, Rothko, and Pollock (see ‘’Portrait and A Dream’’) being important inspirations, for duality and the psychological language of color and scale. In the first stain, band paintings that I made in the late summer of 1969 several including ‘’Rain Dance’’ I, II, III, and IV as well as ‘’Elijah’’ (108×55 inches, US State Department) , and ‘’Any Day Now’’, (108×93 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art), there are drawn and painterly lines – my version of calligraphy in the hard-edge bands, further identifying with Chinese landscape in my own terms. The size, brightness, and aggressive surfaces of my paintings are unmistakably western, but the format and iconography is unmistakably eastern. The reflection and respect for eastern philosophy being also a major inspiration for my work as an artist in the 1960s. My stain band paintings serve as a marriage between east and west. Creating a philosophical unity of east and west being an important aspect of one of the most important issues of our lives…

Serban Savu, The Old Roof, 2009. Oil on canvas, 64 X 87 inches. Courtesy of Mihal Nicodim Gallery

“One word says everything about the people from whom I come and to whom I remain faithful because I find in myself all their defects: minor.  It is not an “inferior” people, it is a people for whom everything turns out small scale, in miniature (not to say caricature), even misfortune.” E.M.Cioran

As if a riposte to Cioran’s talk of “smallness,” the Romania of Serban Savu’s childhood, and the present-day Romania he describes, was and is the victim of colossal hubris.  He was eleven years old when, in the revolution of 1989—less than velvet compared with other East European countries—Nicolae Ceau?escu was deposed and executed, ending his quarter century dictatorship and four decades of communist rule.  The sufferings to which Ceau?escu subjected his country were anything but diminutive. An obsession with driving down national debt and a determination to destroy peasant culture led to years of economic stultification, the physical eradication of half the country’s 13,000 villages, the demolition of swathes of historic city fabric and the permanent scarring of the land with mindless and humungous structures, whether the utterly absurd House of the People, in Bucharest (at three times the size of Versailles, it was, in the words of Tony Judt, “a monstrous lapidary metaphor for unconstrained tyranny”) or conglomerations of mass housing, the “agro-towns” to which dispossessed peasants were sent, incongruously placed in the middle of nowhere.

In response to false grandeur, Savu often paints buildings and industrial structures that are imposing and drab. The eponymous edifice in The Gray 10-floor Block (2008) leaves no room for the sky above it, nor do the abutting blocks in the corner of Unveiling the New Furniture (2010). Savu’s attitude towards communism’s ubiquitous housing projects is ambivalent.  His paintings often acknowledge the stoic dignity of its drab modernism.  His brush finds hidden beauty in decaying concrete comparable to that discovered by the 18th-century Welsh painter Thomas Jones in the back streets of Naples.  The arrangement of browns and grays in the cropped segment of façade in Parking Sunday (2008) has a quiet poetry akin to a still life by Giorgio Morandi.  But beyond aestheticism, his accommodations of brutalist buildings into soft, lyrical landscapes, such as Ludus (2009) for instance, seems to carry a spiritual argument with its non-judgmental juxtaposition of an old village and an agro-town. This sweet and sour image is rich in possible meanings, but at various levels, it is cathartic, a consoling message to his countrymen.  It seems to say that nature can heal wounds, that the disruptive and also potently symbolic dichotomy of these two settlements on different sides of the river and all they represent about futures and pasts can nonetheless blend in some kind of post-historical picturesque.

There are two striking, seemingly contradictory features in the half-decade span of Savu’s short career: an unmistakable Savu look, and significant diversity.  Mood and purpose are consistent, but touch varies almost from canvas to canvas, determined by pictorial content and scale of each image rather than some stylistic progression. He works from photographs, some found in the media and others taken himself, which he assembles into working sources in Photoshop.  His locales are all actual places he knows and studies.  In some paintings there is a tough tightness to the realism, whether of the figures or buildings; in others there is painterly relish, as if within the last five years there are distinctions of touch as marked in Savu as in the extended career of the German 19th-century realist Adolph Menzel, who veered from early impressionism to a finessed classicism.  Savu’s smaller canvases, which often focus on a single figure and a singular observation, are often his most winning.

The more ambitious works, the multi-figure group compositions, are more forcibly touched with an element of incongruity yet they too hold back from full-blown absurdity, or even Surrealism. The Ceau?escu regime was so “surreal” in some of its manifestations – the surveillance techniques of the Securitate, the publishing of Ileana Ceau?escu’s pseudo-science, the cult of leadership that dubbed Ceau?escu “the Genius of the Carpathians, the Danube of Thought” – that Surrealism presents itself as an option to writers like Nobel laureate Herta Müller who, in one of her novels, has an apple tree that grows a mouth with which to devour its own fruit. Even at his most outlandish, Savu is closer to the incipient oddity of Giorgio de Chirico, say, than the overt weirdness of Salvador Dalí or the punning illogic of René Magritte.  Indeed, it is the degree of credibility in the scenes he depicts, and the slow unfolding of futility or misguidedness, that lends his scenes their charge.  He comes close to a symbolic uncanny (akin to the moral of folly in the inverse building construction of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel [1569]) in his painting The Old Roof (2009) in which four boys play soccer on the roof of a building whose center is dominated by a perilous two-storey courtyard.  There is still the possibility of a rational, prosaic explanation as to what is going on, however, that the boys are engaged in a dare-devil game in which the chasm of a courtyard adds gladiatorial risk to proceedings.

Film still: Ciprian Mure?an, Untitled (Monks), 2011, color HD video, 12 min 10 sec. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery. The monk on the right is played by Serban Savu

While Surrealism is a valid option for Müller in stories directly confronting the horrors of the Ceau?escu regime and the consequences of offering it resistance, to Savu and his close-knit circle of peers who were at art school together in Cluj, and whose study and launch of career take place post-1989, something more subtle and diffident is called for to describe the numbed state of reconstruction, of discovering normality amidst the ruins of a failed regime, and of coming to terms with the past as children of its last years, and of parents who had simply to keep their heads down and survive.  They are a generation that seems skeptical of big gestures and grand narratives.  It is telling that many of them have exhibited with the Cluj gallery Plan B whose very name betokens a bemused sense of what to do next.  Savu’s close associate, Ciprian Mure?an, works in a variety of conceptual and traditional modes but consistently in ways that send up the hubris of systems and situations with a gentle, comic understatement: exquisite pastiches of socialist realist drawings of (glue sniffing) young pioneers blowing into plastic bags; young school children reading Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros; a wall text, using vinyl cut from old LPs, that says, in English, “Communism Never Happened.” Mure?an’s gentle provocations seem intended to place him out of the market of big gestures.  There is, likewise, a wry and diminutive sensibility at play in Cristi Pog?cean’s sculpture, Modernist Bird House 2005-07, where the rationalist, functionalist architectural style adopted by the Party in mass housing units takes on markedly different attributes in this dainty, effete folly.

Savu’s delicious painterly touch is too assured to equate with the dazed and confused state of mind of the characters and situations he depicts, and yet there are elements in his style – his quietude, understatement, eclecticism, lack of flashiness – that relate to the shellshock mood of the post-1989 generation.

Though he attended the prestigious art school in Cluj, Savu is largely self-taught in his realism.  There is a common misconception about contemporary Eastern European artists that somehow, like Russian or Chinese artists, they must automatically be steeped in the language and techniques of academic socialist realism as if these are residual skills still enforced in art schools. Savu’s professor at Cluj in the 1990s was the neo-romantic painter Ioan Sbarciu, a colleague of the German neo-expressionist Markus Lüpertz and now a senator in Romania’s parliament, who would certainly have had no reason to enforce redundant styles.  Savu’s older colleague, Victor Man, took himself to Jerusalem to study at the small, independent atelier of expatriate American painter Israel Hershberg, the Jerusalem Studio School, to learn the old master techniques he craved.  Savu found his technique from close study of renaissance painting during an extended residency in Venice in 2002-04 (as recipient of the Nicolae Lorga postgraduate research grant) and this perhaps accounts for the relative primitivism in his handling of form, which is anti-academic.  In Cluj, while still a student, Man had sought out the underground painter Cornel Brudascu, an artist who had been persecuted by the regime for his sexual orientation and painted in eclectic styles.  Excelling as a flower painter, Brudascu became a personal hero to Man, Savu and a third young painter, Adrian Ghenie simply for his determination to do his own thing.  Savu’s painterly language, therefore, should not be read as an ironic riff on socialist realism in the way that makes conceptual sense in relation to the German Neo Rauch, who studied at Leipzig in the 1980s and makes skillful use of appropriated, anachronistic painting modes.

This argument does not preclude symbolic significance in elements of Savu’s style.  There is almost a willful dullness in his invariably subdued palette and a certain chalkiness in the texture of his paint that matches his pervasive melancholy.  That concrete is so prevalent a motif lends an odd associative feeling that somehow dust has rubbed off the buildings into the very pigment.  His dry, slow, carefully modulated paint application contrasts with the oily  flourishes favored by Man (in earlier works) and Ghenie.  Savu’s literal lack of slickness accords with the temper of his paintings.

Introducing art theory to the distinction between scale and size, Alberti exhorts the reader of his treatise on painting with the words: “Istoria gives greater renown to the intellect than any colossus.” Savu’s paintings are a profound record of a society in recovery from colossal errors of governance.  Recently, he has embarked on what are for him large paintings, but most typically, he is happy with a modest scale, and as has been suggested, a modest touch, pace and emotional distance.  He works in an idiom that is in two distinct senses “out” of history: it is historically derived (though without constituting a quotation or pastiche a particular moment) and it is out of step with current expectations. In much the way that American artists Elizabeth Peyton, Paul R. or Duncan Hannah adopt an illustrative, knowingly slight language that matches their penchant for nostalgia and infatuation, and within whose limiting confines there is nonetheless space for expressive growth, so Savu adopts a plainspoken style that risks blandness for the sake of empathy with his subject, and as an antidote to the bombastic imposition of grand schemes. This suggests, in contrast with his meteoric career successes as an artist collected avidly around the world, a kind of elective minority, a willingness to occupy a small corner of painting. Savu has found a niche where he can observe a future for his countrymen and work one out for his art.

Extracted by kind permission of Hatje Cantz.  Serban Savu: Paintings 2005-2010 is available from David Nolan Gallery and good booksellers

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