Victor Man
17 Sep - 23 Oct 2011
VICTOR MAN
The dust of others
17 September - 23 October, 2010
“And there were these black eggs from which nothing good could come / out – but venom and acrimony – and this was his labor and adornments – cause / they were as stars that choose to be secretive by reverting their initial / gleaming – restoring an operating equilibrium. / And this only to apprentice him, which seemed bigger than nothing. / Then time was impeccable and the noise of thunder a crown of forms.”
Gilles Deleuze used to say that artists return from what they see and hear with teary eyes and perforated eardrums.
What Victor Man perceives, he never ceases to transform it, giving birth to a universe that can be explored endlessly, where paintings and installations are informed successively by one another through various shapes, levels of perception and different ways of understanding. Points of view are multiplied, fit into one another: all emerge from the coexistence of an infinite number of perspectives in which the object is dismantled, echoed and amplified, disappears, and resurfaces again.
A peculiar universe of fantasies is created, travelled with inner tensions, perhaps with hidden and violent fears; a universe prompting us to perceive the smallest of variations, to see beyond.
In Victor Man’s work everything lives, everything exists in those dark lands, secretive worlds where we face unnamed creatures, unsuspected landscapes, enigmatic positions, a violence of situations that seem to unfold, to arise, to come to life at the very moment we lay our eyes on them.
The group of works titled Pagan space revolves around the assemblage Composition with a pagan statue, that functions as a sort of altar, where the statue is surrounded by elements of adornment.
The idol statue is a found object invested with exceptional significance through the impulse of a dream – dream seen as a metaphor for the supreme medium of knowledge.*
The empty cat-food can, that stands as a pedestal for the mysterious black figure, sends us back – through its hint – to the chrome yellow edges of the black painting behind, alluding to the eye of a cat, and to the cat’s mental vistas: a world populated by an unsettling bestiary (inspired by an illustration of Maurice Sand’s Légendes rustiques) for which cats are known as witnesses.
Complementary to Pagan space, in the show is presented also the series called Spells (a succession of six monochrome paintings and a collection of classified ads of fortune-tellers, found in local Romanian newspapers), inspired by the “unpredictable outcome and madness” of Antonin Artaud. The geometry of these monochromatic structures alludes to the idea of play, that here stands to evoke the concept of mystery.
Questioning the very essence of knowledge and the many ways of gaining access to it, the dust of others allows to experiment apparitions, mystical and enigmatic visions on the fringe of the invisible.
*The ethnologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux reports about the Mojave tribes believe, that shamanistic powers and knowledge of myths can be only acquired in dreams – otherwise remaining sterile
The dust of others
17 September - 23 October, 2010
“And there were these black eggs from which nothing good could come / out – but venom and acrimony – and this was his labor and adornments – cause / they were as stars that choose to be secretive by reverting their initial / gleaming – restoring an operating equilibrium. / And this only to apprentice him, which seemed bigger than nothing. / Then time was impeccable and the noise of thunder a crown of forms.”
Gilles Deleuze used to say that artists return from what they see and hear with teary eyes and perforated eardrums.
What Victor Man perceives, he never ceases to transform it, giving birth to a universe that can be explored endlessly, where paintings and installations are informed successively by one another through various shapes, levels of perception and different ways of understanding. Points of view are multiplied, fit into one another: all emerge from the coexistence of an infinite number of perspectives in which the object is dismantled, echoed and amplified, disappears, and resurfaces again.
A peculiar universe of fantasies is created, travelled with inner tensions, perhaps with hidden and violent fears; a universe prompting us to perceive the smallest of variations, to see beyond.
In Victor Man’s work everything lives, everything exists in those dark lands, secretive worlds where we face unnamed creatures, unsuspected landscapes, enigmatic positions, a violence of situations that seem to unfold, to arise, to come to life at the very moment we lay our eyes on them.
The group of works titled Pagan space revolves around the assemblage Composition with a pagan statue, that functions as a sort of altar, where the statue is surrounded by elements of adornment.
The idol statue is a found object invested with exceptional significance through the impulse of a dream – dream seen as a metaphor for the supreme medium of knowledge.*
The empty cat-food can, that stands as a pedestal for the mysterious black figure, sends us back – through its hint – to the chrome yellow edges of the black painting behind, alluding to the eye of a cat, and to the cat’s mental vistas: a world populated by an unsettling bestiary (inspired by an illustration of Maurice Sand’s Légendes rustiques) for which cats are known as witnesses.
Complementary to Pagan space, in the show is presented also the series called Spells (a succession of six monochrome paintings and a collection of classified ads of fortune-tellers, found in local Romanian newspapers), inspired by the “unpredictable outcome and madness” of Antonin Artaud. The geometry of these monochromatic structures alludes to the idea of play, that here stands to evoke the concept of mystery.
Questioning the very essence of knowledge and the many ways of gaining access to it, the dust of others allows to experiment apparitions, mystical and enigmatic visions on the fringe of the invisible.
*The ethnologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux reports about the Mojave tribes believe, that shamanistic powers and knowledge of myths can be only acquired in dreams – otherwise remaining sterile