THE HEROES
- curated by Dan Popescu, H'Art Gallery, Bucharest, 2005 -
- some works appeared also in "Arts Sports Club" (curated by Erwin Kessler at The Museum of Recent Art, MARe, Bucharest, 2021) and in "Heroes/Anti-Heroes" (curated by Raluca Demetrescu at Art Safari, Bucharest, 2021)
- series of national & international heroes -
Emanuel Borcescu is cynical but lacking the catastrophic hysteria of the nineties. He mocks, first of all, painting itself, understood as a place to represent the representation-worthy, as a mirror and an ode to the power, a high class prostitute for the most beloved sons of the motherland. Then he passes to Romania of the year 2005 that has (finally!) found the elites it had looked for in the nineties, elites perfectly resembling it, based on the slogan “anything for everyone”. The businessman Becali and the philosopher Patapievici, the pop and movie star Stefan Banica jr. and the Romanian President Basescu are the most different characters possible, but quite similar personalities, in terms of their brands. The same mass fascination, the same confused respect of the hysterical crowds repeating their names in an almost religious way, loving and hating in a sado-maso way the ones whom they’ve entrusted the future of the motherland. The anatomy of their power and the structure of the relationship between the personality and its target audience is almost interchangeable, be it Patapievici and Romania’s intellectuals, or Becali and the field workers.
The visual illustration chosen by Emanuel Borcescu is the autochthonous kitsch, adorable in its extreme, the kitsch of the living rooms, of the objects and of the suburbs, the kitsch of the lack of proportions in Romanian society.
text by Cosmin Costinas in the volume '32 Romanian Painters"
