Dark Metamorphoses Victor Man Is Artist of the Year 2014
He’s
one of the world’s most compelling contemporary artists. Now Deutsche
Bank has named the Romanian Victor Man “Artist of the Year” 2014.
Oliver Koerner von Gustorf on Man’s puzzling work, and his predilection
for headless heroes.
Victor Man - Deutsche Bank "Artist of the Year" 2014
Victor Man’s paintings look like they
have darkened over centuries. There’s something sacred about them, like
the images and devotional objects hanging in the faint light of chapels
and churches. In our enlightened, medialized world, in which everything
is on the surface and things have to be “brought to light,” they look
like something from another era. His works take the viewer into an
enigmatic cosmos in which strange metamorphoses take place under the
veil of darkness. In Man’s work, animate and inanimate, human and
animal, male and female, appear to be in constant exchange and, as in
an alchemistic process, undergoing a fusion.
The paintings,
objects, and installations that have garnered the Romanian artist (who
was born in 1974) international acclaim in the last ten years are
appealing and disturbing at the same time. Grand Practice,
a painting from 2008 that is one of his most well-known works, shows a
stooping figure on all fours – half human, half horse, constricted by a
leather harness and latex, with a mane and hoofs. The boots and the
shiny silver material prompt inevitable associations with fetish
clothing and rituals of dominance and subjugation, as does the
painfully constrained position of the body. We are literally left in
the dark about what is skin, hair, or material on this creature, about
what is artificial or organic, about what are limbs and what are
prostheses.
But this non-obviousness opens up different
possibilities of recognition, remembrance, and seeing. Man’s creatures
could have their origin in the banal flood of images on the Internet or
in mythological creatures. The expression “Grand Practice” conjures up
the completion of secret exercises mastered only by the initiated,
whether in magical, sexual, or spiritual contexts. All of these
practices are connected with the act of self-experience. Perhaps this
exercise could also consist in recognizing that life is not very human
but animalistic, or is full of sorrow and an existential sense of
abandonment.
Naturally, Grand Practice can be read
as a symbol of the condition humaine. But not even this is certain, as
Man juxtaposes human nature with an absolutely artificial one in which
everything is “made,” a construct, a construction. In other paintings,
too, such as Untitled (2006) and Shaman
(2008), people wear masks and rubber suits, are constricted in bizarre
costumes. “This creature might be a man or a woman,“ writes the English
curator and critic Tom Morton, “a fighter or a physician, somebody who
harms or heals. What matters here, however, is not what is beneath its
slick, shiny skin, but the skin itself, and what narratives or
possibilities might be projected onto it.” Thus Man’s paintings also
function as skins. Paradoxically, it doesn’t matter where the images
come from, on what they are based, what their content or actual context
was. “It's like stripping the image of its initial significance in
order to construct a new one with it,” the artist said in 2007 in an
interview with the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
“It's a process of emptying the images in this sense. But emptying
always leaves par of the original layer inside. It's like stealing
their soul and taking it to a different place.”
It is
precisely this practice that has spawned one of the most complex and
idiosyncratic oeuvres in recent contemporary art. Now Victor has been
named Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” and will be featured in a
solo exhibition in the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle
starting in March 2014. The award is given to artists who have created
a substantial work in which paper or photography play a role. At the
same time, it was initiated to honor impulses coming from the new art
centers in Africa, Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. One of
these new hubs is Man’s home city of Cluj
in Transylvania, where, in addition to his studio in Berlin, he still
works in his boyhood room. Cluj, situated halfway between Bucharest and
Budapest, is home to a vital art scene whose international appeal is
inextricably entwined with Man’s career and Plan B Gallery,
which opened in 2005 with a solo show devoted to the artist. It was the
first gallery exhibition in Romania which a large U.S. art magazine
reviewed - Art in America. Plan B was initiated by the artists Mihai Pop and Adrian Ghenie
not only as a production and exhibition space for current art, but also
as a research and documentation center aiming to raise international
awareness of undiscovered Romanian artists and works from the last
fifty years.
The success of Plan B and Victor Man was resounding. His work was shown at the 2005 Prague Biennale, and at the 2007 Venice Biennale,
where Plan B was showcased in the Romanian Pavilion, the same year in
which Romania joined the EU. He contributed various works to the group
show Low Budget Monuments: in addition to an intervention
on the building’s outer façade, for which he filled gaps between the
ROMANIA insignia above the main entrance with shreds of old fur coats,
different sculptures and a large painting of a group of children in fur
costumes rehearsing in front of the landscape setting of a puzzling
play. When he was asked in an interview by the German curator and
art historian Yilmaz Dziewior
whether there was a link between the “political” statement on the
façade and the surreal-looking painting, Man replied: “It is not that
we were trying to create very direct literary connections between the
works exhibited there, but rather looking to make a connection between
them in a more subliminal way. […] But you see once you start to take
away the ... let's call it 'veil' from things, I think it is not as
interesting anymore. I like the noumenon you might get from the
disparate associations, without the loss of meaning.”
For Plato, the noumenon
was “that which is known by intellect or spiritual sense as opposed to
what is seen by the eye,” phenomena that can be experienced with the
senses. Victor Man’s works close themselves off in terms of their
appearance so they can be “recognizable” in a new and different way.
Unlike a large part of the painting of recent decades, which relied on
representation, large formats, and overwhelming power, Victor Man’s
paintings are dark, generally in small formats, almost intimate. In the
past, he often presented them in the form of installations, in
connection with objects and materials such as fur, thus emphasizing the
objective, corporeal character of his painting. For Composition with a Pagan Statue
(2010), for example, Man combines an oil painting with a print hung
above it that shows a satellite floating in space. An African sculpture
he found at a flea market stands on a thin, plain metal stand. A can of
cat food serves as the pedestal. It is an ironic comment on the anthropocentric
worldview on which Western culture and enlightened modernist thought
are based. What we call “reason” has not only brought progress but has
also triggered unforeseeable crises.
Man’s art seems to radically dispense with reason. Not only does he resurrect demons or saints, as in Untitled (After Sassetta, St. Anthony the Hermit Tortured by the Devils)
from 2010-11. In addition, many protagonists in his more recent
paintings have become almost demonstrably headless – as though the
artist wants to free them from rational control and give them greater
access to their body and their unconscious. The initials S.D.
repeatedly appear in the titles of Man’s recent works, an allusion to Stephen Dedalus, the main character of James Joyce’s semibiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
from 1916. In Man’s work, Dedalus is in a continual process of
transformation and appears as an androgynous figure between the sexes.
In Untitled (S. D. as Judith and Holofernes),
for example, Man portrays him as a woman holding an African-looking
mask on her lap, with her face frozen in the same mask-like pose and
her eye sockets black. The form recurs with male features in Untitled from 2013. As a paradoxical version of Hamlet, Dedalus views a black miniature skull. Man runs through the motif of the “headless” woman in his most recent series Le Chandler (2013): an androgynous sitting figure whose head cannot be seen in the picture is balancing something on her knees that turns out to be a female head.
In his “decapitated” images, Man was greatly inspired by George Bataille and Acéphale,
the publication of his secret society of the same name. The cover
picture of the first edition, of which five appeared between 1936 and
1939, shows an illustration by André Masson:
a headless man with a burning heart in one hand and a dagger in the
other. A skull conceals his gender. The illustration is a counterpoint
to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man,
which is constructed based on ancient rules of proportion and
symbolizes harmony and reason. For Bataille, Masson’s version was a
liberation – not only death and chaos, but also a reunion with base
instincts: with the unconscious, sexuality, lust.
In Victor
Man’s dark world, however, this reunion does not occur as a triumphal
act of liberation. At most, it suggests itself subliminally. Like the
horselike creature in Grand Practice, the androgynous figures of Le Chandler
assume ritualized poses and wear costumes. Much more than a triumph or
departure, they speak of tolerance, self-control, and contemplation.
They keep their secrets with artful restraint, “the veil that covers
things.” Baitaille’s Acéphale, Joyce’s Dedalus, the
myths and images that these beings have engendered, lie hidden in it,
layer for layer, and forgotten. But this is precisely what constitutes
their promise – that they will enable us to feel what cannot be said,
shown, or rediscovered.
