Victor Man, Untitled, 2012. © Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Photo: Mathias Schormann
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Victor Man, The Chandler, 2013.© Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin. Photo: Mathias Schormann
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Victor Man, The Chandler, 2013.© Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin. Photo: Mathias Schormann
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Victor Man, Untitled (Les Aubes), 2013.
Oil on canvas mounted on wood, 42 x 32 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin
Photo: Stefan Korte
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Victor Man, Aspen, 2009. © Courtesy of the artist and ZERO, Milan. Photo: Elena Datrino
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Victor Man, Composition with Three Ellipses, 2013. © Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Plan B, Berlin/Cluj. Photo: Roberto Apa
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With Victor Man,
it’s all or nothing. His paintings take us down to the abysmal depths
of human existence, showing us our dreams, our nightmares, longing,
despair, desire, and aggression. This is a cryptic and dark cosmos, but
one that is oddly seductive. Mask-like faces, androgynous figures
caught between life and death, idiosyncratic plays in wolf costumes,
magic tokens such as animal horns, crystal stars, crosses, or simply
silvery shimmering branches: these scenarios may seem surreal or even
improvised, but the fact is that nothing is left to chance. On the
contrary, everything is in its rightful place. Victor Man often quotes
Old Master paintings and refers to them in the titles of his works. And
even though the figure squeezed into latex from head to toe might have
been lifted from some fetish website, one is inevitably reminded of the
legendary costumes of the performance artist Leigh Bowery.
Victor
Man offers us nothing less than a painted existentialism, though one
that follows his own rules—rules we might guess at, but will never
fully fathom. Nor can we turn to his pictures for help in understanding
his ethereal world. An animal head hazily hovers in space; a hand
touches the legs of a woman of whom we see only the lower body. An
androgynous Hamlet presents to us a miniature skull, above it the
words: Titanik Bar.
Victor Man: “Artist of the Year” 2014In
what is the most comprehensive presentation of his works to date,
“Artist of the Year” 2014 Victor Man is showing an overview of his
oeuvre in the exhibition Zephir at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle.
New paintings will be on view, as well as a work on glass created
expressly for the exhibition. With the “Artist of the Year” award,
Deutsche Bank honors contemporary artists who have already created a
substantial body of work and blaze new trails.
Sometimes Man emphasizes the object
character of his pictures by backing them with animal skins or
combining them with sparsely distributed objects to create a spatial
installation: a chain here, some wire mesh there, an assemblage of
chairs or a floor-mounted statuette. But these additional layers of
signification only make Man’s semiotics even more puzzling and
inscrutable. You find yourself continually wondering: how does it all
fit together?
Mere descriptions quickly run aground, incapable
of doing justice to the visual qualities of this enigmatic imagery.
Victor Man does not like to discuss his work, he does not want to be
photographed, and he rarely gives interviews. He sees no reason to
explain the cryptic figures and props in his paintings and
installations. Apart from some clues in the titles, we have nothing to
go on. We’re left to our own devices in trying to divine meanings. We
have to look carefully, to engage with an enchanted world alive with
irrationalities and allusions, to delve into a cosmos rife with
historical references and scholarship, but which defies any clear
scholastic interpretation. Victor Man sets boundaries on our
understanding. One message of these works is, however, quite clear:
nothing is as it seems.
Perhaps it makes sense to first approach
Victor Man’s art from an aesthetic viewpoint. Leaving aside all the
perplexing mind games, we can simply indulge in enjoyment of masterful
painting. Man is a virtuoso in playing with color values, in modulating
his figures’ pale countenances and heightening their skin in white
until they look like stone under hoarfrost. He effortlessly commands
both black-in-black and icy gray mist, weathered surfaces and
meticulous painterly detail. There can be no doubt that the act of
painting itself is a central theme here. Man plumbs all its
possibilities with relish. He makes blouses wrinkle as if trying to
rival the Baroque greats, he shades faces and builds up spectral veils of color with the best of the Symbolists, he sets vinyl S&M costumes glistening, or takes the finest of brushes in hand to depict every last fiber of a bloom.
Man’s
trademark is above all the gloom into which he plunges most of his
paintings. They look as though they had spent centuries slumbering in
archives, or had gone through whole odysseys in smoky candle-lit
churches or cigarette-clouded bars. He not only paints the patina; he
makes it a subject in its own right. History is omnipresent: very
concretely in pictorial quotes from Sassetta’s Temptation of St. Anthony or in a statuette of Jupiter from André Malraux’s Musée imaginaire. The dream visions of the Surrealists naturally come to mind, as do the doll-like girls and women painted by Balthus,
whose frozen faces sometimes gaze out at you from Man’s paintings
almost like direct quotes. But there are also literary allusions, for
example to Shakespeare’s Hamlet or to the character of Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce’s novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.
“His approach to history is fully conscious, but totally free,” says curator Alessandro Rabottini,
who realized exhibitions with the artist in Bergamo and Rome. “He deals
quite intimately with the history of painting, but does not limit
himself to a postmodern quoting of concepts and motifs.” Rodica Seward, owner of the Paris auction house Tajan
and one of the most dedicated collectors of Man’s work, likewise views
the artist’s engagement with the past as among his most outstanding
qualities: “There is a perfect interpenetration of classical and
contemporary. His images give me a feeling of timelessness, of
eternity, and yet always remain rooted in the here and now.”
Man
exhausts the possibilities of his appropriation strategy, yet always
manages to maintain the fine line between depiction and mood, between
myth and reality , cliché and magic. The precision, and presumably also
hesitation, with which he takes up his quotations, motif snippets, and
stylistic borrowings is palpable; it is no coincidence that he usually
condenses these ingredients in small formats instead of seeking refuge
in the grand gesture like so many contemporary painters. “He proceeds
with the utmost economy of means. Nothing is there without a reason; it
is almost minimalist,” enthuses Seward. Nothing could be further from
Man’s mind than to create picture puzzles that can be unraveled layer
by layer (like Baroque allegories or Surrealist dream visions). We are
not meant to decode his iconographies, but instead to willingly immerse
ourselves at least temporarily in their occult, sexually, and
intellectually charged atmosphere.
Man’s works are sought-after
today throughout the art world. The Romanian artist, born in 1974 in
Cluj (Kolozsvár), can look back on a remarkable career that began in
2005 in his hometown, far away from the international art centers. That
year, the artists Mihai Pop and Adrian Ghenie opened their Galeria Plan B
with a solo exhibition of Man’s work. The gallery soon made a name for
itself as a showroom and art mecca, helping to establish a lively arts
scene in the remote Transylvanian mountain town that soon put it on the
global art map. Just two years later, in 2007, the Plan B artists were
put in charge of organizing the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Ever since then, they have been appearing frequently at prestigious art spaces and galleries from Berlin to Los Angeles.
Deutsche Bank and its Global Art Advisory Council—Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Udo Kittelmann, and Victoria Noorthoorn—have chosen in Victor Man a highly idiosyncratic, sometimes almost dismissive figure as “Artist of the Year.”
The decision also signals a commitment to the penchant for the obscure
and diffuse, for vague allusions and a detachment from reality, that
can be found in the work of so many contemporary artists. This is a
noticeable trend in times when a chaotic, crisis-racked world is
longing instead for clear messages. Art is denying them just that. It
does not set out to explain the world or to provide dubious assistance,
only at the most to ask questions or evoke moods. “Art is becoming a
personal place of resistance,” says Rabottini of Man’s work in this
connection. “It may of course incorporate obscure meanings. But in the
end it comes down to preserving supreme freedom.”
With the bleak
universe that he paints so masterfully, Man expresses moods that
resonate with today’s state of mind. His figures and props become the
conveyors of these inner realms, affecting every viewer in a different
way. The Symbolists of the fin de siècle worked in a similar vein, with artists such as Eugène Carrière and Odilon Redon
creating particularly radical and enigmatic images. The period around
1900 vibrated with an energy similar to that of today, with a wild push
for progress that would soon be brought up short by the great
catastrophe to follow. Here, too, Victor Man does not draw any direct
parallels with the past. His works abound with historical reminiscences
yet are unequivocally situated in the up-to-the-minute sphere of
conceptual painting. This is just one of the many contradictions that
make Victor Man’s art so exciting.
Dr. Sebastian Preuss is
an expert on art from the Middle Ages to the present. He lives in
Berlin. Since 2012, he has been deputy editor-in-chief of the German
magazine Weltkunst.
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