![]() However, in choosing his references, whether inherited, acquired, or absorbed, the artist presents such complex and faceted person- alities that a polarized mode of thinking becomes simplistic. Even color is only one part of the complex web of significations of his work chromophobia seems to be another expression of his arbitrary order: essence over appearance, transcendence over common sense, the infinite ever over the finite now. It’s a mixture of modernist mono- chrome and residual figuration, or better, minimalist aesthetic austerity. In these works, the forms soar into space only to remove themselves and melt into the background as ghosts, as if to announce an absence rather than a presence, which encourage meditation on the flow between perma- nence and change, on ideas of veiling and revealing with an eye turned inward.Įlusive, allusive, discontinuous and fluid, Man’s painting is difficult to classify. It is present in the monochromatic painting installation Perfect Crime, shown at Plan b gallery in Cluj, where the viewer is left unable to convey an accurate truth about the subject portrayed, as well as in the images of a man buried in snow or of a painter with his easel in open space. Even if the artist leaves very little trace of his subjectivity in the works, the desire to play with the audience, to control its gaze, emerges everywhere from underneath. This distance produces or unveils a lack within the viewer who is transformed into a voyeur trying - in every inch of painting and around it - to grasp the reality beyond the appearances. He conceives his work as a signifier, but one which serves to distance the viewer from reality. What is not so visible however lingering throughout his paintings is the scopophilic element to which the act of repression is led. It is a tactic of minimal interference for maximal effect within the relational and repetitive continuum we experience. Connected analog- ically, through a heightened awareness of context and through personal idiosyn- crasies, they recalibrate the perception of the world with which they are identified, and replace linear, conventional narrative with arbitrary layers and cycles. ![]() quiet) or in the show “The Place I’m Coming From,” all absorbing interplays between spaces of reality and potentiality. ![]() ![]() The works produce meaning not by themselves but through their relationship within a shifting territory where narrative is a matter of negotiating locations, as it happens in The Maneuver, none (mr. They are in a way ‘combines,’ exploring a certain formalist aesthetic through a language determined both from within and without by a sense of hybrid unity. The images are transposed into wall drawings and oil paintings grouped as assemblages in relation to the architectural space in which they are placed. Courtesy the Artist, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.īut what exactly are Man’s practice and his sources? He constantly uses images originated in the mass media, depriving them of any reference to what they represent or to the context they come from, to the point where identifying any logic fails and the image remains open to both abstraction and the impulse of a new story- telling. His work functions more in the realm of semiotics than reality, allowing the painting to be part of the world, in its infinite openness and density, rather than letting the world into the painting as a form of closure. What is set in place is not clearly defined what is present invokes what is absent. A relatively minor detour or diversion can lead to an entirely new subject area. Move them around and a different configuration will result. The viewer is presented with a sense of dissolving bound- aries where the narrative appears posi- tioned but not fixed, as the mutual depend- ency of its multiple units can at any time be altered. Every work can function as a point of departure, within a logic of contiguity that leads to new and unexpected connections, like a cinematographic montage. It is a space of possibilities, in contact with itself at all points, inside it, outside it, next to it. Victor Man’s painting is not what is but rather all that might be. Courtesy the Artist, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam. Certain Way To Fade Away (detail) (2006).
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