Painted in 2007, The Heat is an early and formative work by Șerban Savu, made at
precisely the moment when the Cluj School was gaining its first international
attention. Two shirtless figures stand on the concrete parapet of a communist era
apartment block, workers, or perhaps simply neighbors, caught in the suspended
stillness of a summer afternoon. The air conditioning unit mounted on the wall
below is the one concession to modernity, and it is telling: Romania was changing
rapidly, and Savu knew it. The painting belongs to the body of work that
established his signature subject matter, the quiet dignity of ordinary labor and
leisure in the post-communist landscape, before Westernization would begin to
dissolve the communal rhythms of life he was documenting. Savu subsequently
represented Romania at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, where his pavilion,
curated by Ciprian Mureșan, presented some forty paintings on the themes of
work and rest.