Artbeat November 2005

Artbeat
Echoes of Nabi in Emanuel Borcescu’s art

November 2005

By Andreea Sarcani

Although he once dreamed of becoming a tennis player or a pharmacist, Emanuel Borcescu’s decision to take a Bucharest high school art course led him irreversibly towards the visual arts. A graduate of the graphic art department of the Bucharest University of Art, he sees art as the real way, along with love and religion, of saving man from history.

We live in an era when it appears that the most important thing, whatever your work environment, is to deal with people, and success is just the science of getting along with the right people. Says Borcescu: “As an artist I also believe that the most valuable time is that which I spend alone. It’s like the prelude to the moment of actually carrying out a work. In fact, any form of art stems from the wish to return to yourself and tends towards knowledge of yourself.”
An artist has to be frank with himself, to trust himself and his perceptions, which are for him a treasure trove. But at the same time he should ideally leave open a window to the world, towards the society in which he lives, and to always be receptive to the changes occurring in his artistic medium.

A passion for French trends such as the Nabi movement of the late 19th century and Post-Impressionism often turn up in many of his works. His works depict landscapes with opulent gardens. These symbols of earthly paradises aim to save us from the banality of day to day life, from obsessions, and try to represent an oasis of self-withdrawal, relaxation and meditation.

He says he would have enjoyed being a contemporary and colleague of Jean Baptiste Greuze and Boucher, figures from the French rococo, and to have worked in a tapestry workshop in France. In fact, it was the French tapestries that impressed him most upon visiting the Louvre. “I like tapestries because they help me to have a profoundly visual language, they can confer intimacy and a chance to get out of a drab landscape.”

What’s interesting is the art of the present epoch is the superimposition of the layers which comprise a work of art, like metatextualism in literature, which aims at the contruction of a universe that can be perceived at more than one level.

Salvinia Vintage, lynoprint on paper, 50cm w x 70 cm, same as below.

His experience of the world of advertising has helped him in synthesising his own artistic message, while creating an image of himself as an artist that can be perceived by a hypothetical public.

He has no outstanding attachment to any one visual art form, the medium of expression being, in his view, a secondary idea. „I don’t set out to adopt a particular form. A project that has it’s authentic origin in the artist’s imagination appears as a unity. The idea is born already in connection with its form.”
Sometimes he dreams of having a house in an isolated part of Norway, where he could live in winter and go fishing in summer. And he dreams of working on tapestries by the banks of the Loire. He would have liked to ramble the streets of interwar London. He has a propensity for English accessories, which for him suggest warmth, elegance and domesticity.

He considers that Romanians, as a people, lack clarity in taking decisions in key moments. “We’re a very paradoxical people. We’re brutal and inconsiderate with each other on buses and then half an hour become sentimental and poetic. Seen from outside, all this has some charm and, I know its been said a million times before, but Romania is a country of great contrasts.”