The Fourth Shift

"The Fourth Shift" is the latest solo exhibition by Emanuel Borcescu, marking the strong debut of the Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery in 2024. The exhibition showcases creations from the period 2017-2023, featuring primarily oil paintings, charcoal drawings, an in-situ mural intervention, and an archive of photographs spanning over a decade. The exhibition tells the story of the artist's fascination with the rusty and twilight spaces of the defunct Romanian industry. Emanuel Borcescu consistently focuses on the recent past that still haunts our collective imagination: the abandonment and disdain we feel towards the current Romanian corruption, which, driven by petty personal interests, has crippled the Romanian industry. The artist adds a touch of social criticism; his representations are not merely beautifully painted depictions of dismantled machinery but carry a subversive charge that speaks to our society, its capabilities, and incapacities.

Remnants of the Day
In communist Romania, most enterprises operated in three shifts of eight hours each, throughout the entire day. The fourth shift does not have a specific time of day following the night; it is not measured in continuous minutes but serves as a metaphor for ruin, a descent into destruction. It suggests the moment after the working hours have ended, the transition from a political regime of oppression and hard labor to a wild capitalism without industry. It is the time after a hammer has struck an anvil for the last time. It is a period of catharsis expressed through static nature and/or landscapes, industrial-themed vanitas, memento mori represented by lead pipes, washers, screws, large or small machinery, and compositions of letter-signs. The dismantled factories have left traces in the flesh of cities, landscapes, and people's lives. Desolate walls and scaffolds decay, covered in shards and debris, vegetation, and eventually disappear prey to fires, bulldozers, general apathy, and greed. A void filled with nostalgia remains in their wake. Every ruin contains the regret of a bygone time, of lost youth. What once was represents the dawn; the healthy morning, while all that remains is longing. The remnants now were once active, robust, useful. Sic transit gloria mundi!

Through his artistic practice, Emanuel Borcescu appropriates the "soul" of these machines, transforming them into signs, inscriptions, a language in abstract words, liberating measures. He paints moments of this fall: disfigured engines, industrial residues, remnants of machinery, ruins of the relics of major enterprises. He is caught between these abandoned cables, in the narrow space between two lathes, between the dilapidated wall and a broken mill, between boilers and emptied and rusted files. But not only the artist is trapped within these forms dominating the Romanian visual field of the last thirty-five years; the observer looking at them is also captive, living in the same modules. The artist's gaze upon these disintegrated machines and interiors of industrial buildings is that of an empathetic observer. We could interpret the represented "rusts" as (psychological) portraits of a bygone and transitioning world.

If Emanuel Borcescu's drawings from 2014 in the "Schlafwagen" exhibition represented a commentary on the collective journey, the commuters on the "sleeper car" moving through a reliquary-type space, the works presented here provide a voyeuristic look through a magnifying glass at these types of forms that are still oppressive, under which we exist when we become lucid.

The "Fourth Shift" exhibition comprises two series of works: interior landscapes, portraits of disintegrating industrial equipment, and a number of larger canvases that border on abstract form, depicting fictional writings, letter-signs whose form is derived from post-industrial landscapes. The artist employs a restrained color palette, with colored grays intended to emphasize the state of abandonment, loss, and nostalgia.

Social Project, Documentation
The study and representation of these remnants have been a longstanding and constant concern in Emanuel Borcescu's artistic practice, resulting in several projects. In 2006, he temporarily transformed the already disused studios of the Romanian Television on Molière Street into a creative workshop for the "TVR 50 years" exhibition. In 2010, he visited Petroșani and photographed the former industrial town, already abandoned. In 2014, at Magheru One, during the White Night of the Galleries, he created charcoal drawings inspired by documentary images from the post-industrial period.

Over the years, he documented photographically several workshops on Gheorghe Țițeica Street in Bucharest, workshops still in operation, "preserved relics" as he calls them. In 2015 and 2016, he photographed the Faur factories in Bucharest, gate four, or what remained of them. In 2022, he documented the gradual dismantling of the former IMGB enterprise, near which, by chance, he moved his residence and witnessed directly its destruction. On December 24, 2023, the Minister of Labor officially announced that, starting from that day, Romania no longer has an industry.

Curator Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu