Victor Man
29 Apr - 11 Jun 2016
VICTOR MAN
Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough
29 April – 11 June 2016
Victor Man’s painting invites to writing, requires a careful description into words, an analytical and extensive exposition, in an attempt to “translate”, to show what is seen, revealed, what comes about, what the artist basically does, his type of action and its purpose. Writing is seeing. Everything in Victor Man’s paintings is both accurate and mysterious. This is specifically why they seem to require to be integrated into a wider protocol, into a series of actions that one may assume as potentially crucial, decisive for, so to speak, the fate of European culture, of the European creator, of the Western psych-alchemy which is in crisis today – an intellection metaprotocol which must be designed precisely starting with them but bringing salvation further to an open nerve surgery.
I am not the only one who is (epistemically) addicted to Victor Man’s art, to this particular feeling that a decisive discovery is imminent upon a sufficiently thorough examination. After the 2012 Paris Triennale (Intense Proximity), curator Okwui Enwezor also invited Victor Man in the architecturally difficult Giardini “Central Pavilion” of the 2015 Venice Biennale, reserving for the artist the most particular space, which he called in an article “Victor Man’s secret room”. This exhibition resumes and continues the research showed in 2015, in Venice, presenting the audience with the opportunity of a “live”, “in real time” participation in the most exciting on-site laboratory in contemporary art.
The operation continues: like an alchemist, unselfconscious and absorbed, Victor Man continues to create his “masterpiece”. This is a series of small size works, some starting with a rather enigmatic motif or scene from Pre-renaissance painting (Trecento and Quatrocento). They only appear to be miniatures since, as the painter himself puts it, the subjects are “self-sizing”. The same appearance of scientific protocol, of Ars Magna before the separation of art from science, of physics from metaphysics and even of ethics from politics (namely prior to the apparition of “man” as a cultural and intellectual formation, if we were to follow into Michel Foucault’s “archaeology” from The Order of Things) become here straightforwardly abrupt, as the small paintings inviting the viewer closer, while actually acting as small strategic devices, small para-clinical mechanisms designed to capture the eye and simultaneously performing a surgery on the European optic nerve. Their “subjects” are, for example, small scenes; seemingly classical statues with cracked appearances that makes one wonder whether it is not his own lens, eye, vitreous body, his vision that is cracked; seemingly purely decorative animals; renowned biblical scenes from classical painting; emerging metamorphoses; forbidden unions; flagellations, etc. Contained violence that has already been visually stylised, formalised and civilised: the essence of culture, the essence of Europe.
The paintings thus “exhibit” a modus operandi, a particular and unique technical-scientificartistic protocol comprised of (if they were to be differentiated and listed) three simultaneous procedures: detail separation (most often, as already mentioned, human, animal or humananimal micro-scenes of contained or imminent potential violence that may cause unexpected grafts, hybridity, metamorphoses, evolutions and advents); small and specific frames (over-focus); and, eventually, the extremely particular de-colouring (blackening, greening, reddening: nigredo, “viridendo”, rubedo) specific to Victor Man’s art, in other words an immersion of the “subject” into a bath of “dead-water”/”live-water”, of “shadowing”, in the utmost Jungian alchemy-therapeutic sense. And the pictorial procedure may in itself be illustrated en abyme, as “subject”, through the most curious metamorphoses and adventures, just like the Renaissance columns and arches given by another of Victor Man’s obsessions, the feminine black puppet; or similar to characters that may seem to have the intention for a trans-category symbolic pollination, nearly touching each other but nevertheless stopping on the brink of the crime, on the verge of violence, in the infinitesimal antechamber of action.
It may look like Oneirism, but it is not. It may look like Visionarism, but it is not. Or one may very well say that Victor Man’s art is “oneiric” or “visionary”, but that equals to saying nothing at all. In other words, it would simply mean to avoid taking the challenge and bringing it further – as required – by a possible intellection-salvation possible scenario capable of reuniting, as mentioned, art with science and the soul or spirit with action.
In my operational vision of Victor Man’s vision, he redefines the plane of the painting turning it into an intervention and operation field: blades, lamellae, lenses, matrasses, even homunculi, Faust, Goethe, The Great Tradition, etc. Sense of sight is here both a clinical object (a patient) and an intervention subject (therapeutic intervention). Through meta-operations and in order to be operated and, through it, to be able to operate the essence, the plane of the painting, therefore the plane of vision, is transformed, operationally transmuted into a genital operation field.
And this is where the “scandal” may surge, that part that is not to be spoken of, that is even occult in Victor Man’s operations: the most advanced point of his searches. What is, for example, the operation suggested, revealed beneath our eyes in a work like “Untitled” (2014-2015) from the series “Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough”? A birth or an abortion, a saving intervention to prevent evil or, to the contrary, a malevolent termination of pregnancy – however, all transposed at a supreme historical and cultural level? What does Victor Man intend to hinder, change or, to the contrary, de-block, re-launch, reactivate in the European psychodrama?
Uterus Mundi, Regressus ad uterum: but some – and this is precisely here the absolute novelty that Victor Man grants us – purely plastic, specifically pictorial, a meta-operation (vision of sight) by which, in order to operate, the plane of the painting is simultaneously turned, at the origin of things, at their seminal level, into an uterus and into a clinical operation field.
Victor Man’s painting is alchemic, which does not merely literally mean that it might represent as “object” the historically traditional alchemic operation, or in the mere metaphorical sense applicable to any somewhat consistent work of art, according to which art is alchemy. That is not the case. Victor Man’s art is a continuation or an expansion of the great alchemical operation project by purely pictorial means, providing at a third level (meta-meta-) a vision of the history of painting as alchemical operation in itself.
Victor Man is still concerned, his work is represented by the endeavour for an alchemical ad uterum regression of painting (as privileged tool or mean of intervention on the human) and through painting (as perfected, enhanced, privileged spiritual tool of intervention on the cultural plasticity of the humane, as culture is exactly what may sublimate violence, but which requires germinal violence in order to purify itself through sublimation).
In Victor Man’s n-meta-vision, painting is in itself a re-plasticisation of things, therefore a pictorial return, re-plunge, regression, re-immersion, recovery (painting as Ars Magna) of the plasticity of the beginnings.
Victor Man’s great operation concerns the transformation of the eye into an uterus, a “calibration” and alignment, a metaphysical overlapping between the Eye and the Uterus, between the Vision and the Matrix of things, namely the operation preparing the great operation that actually blends with it, in other words which might even be non-existent: specifically the preparation of the “operation field” and of the laboratory is actually the Great Operation, the Great Art, in itself.
Victor Man operates in the depths of vision, on the eye, on the uterus-eye begetting visions on things, meaning the divine seeds, planes, sketches and croquis.
In his work, Victor Man is tirelessly and obstinately looking for the level at which one may operate, at which he may intervene through sight over the formation of things, the highly spiritual and ultimate operations level of encounter between the eye and the uterus, where painting’s plasticity is found and alchemically identified with the germinative plasticity of things and nature.
An additional proof of his pursuit and heroic advancement on his path, that Victor Man heroically and epically proves himself capable of, is the recent painting (2015-2016) titled “Early Paradise” (and actually representing a study for a “World Flag”), this exceptional painting within painting in which representation is explicitly allegoric, the illustration of the astral eggs and the ovular deformed head stretched towards the maternal breast, an egg, a tear, a bud, a drop of dew, etc., culminating with a new stage in the imagination of the de-colouring, of the “shadowing”, this time by simply effacing colours, as in a restoration work and the return, thus trans-visual, to the drawing beneath, by blotting out to the canvas as reality support that creates a flash upon the covered light, “shadowed” by history.
Victor Man’s path continues abruptly and excitingly and is one of the few “live”, “in real time” spiritual adventures with what we might probably call, for more accuracy and receptivity, cotemporary art (which, unlike con-temporary art, involves the acceptance of certain multiple temporalities, rhythms and traditions): a research open to a decisive “infra-” or “nano-” cultural level.
Bogdan Ghiu, “Doctor Man’s Laboratory (The Uterus-Eye)” – Text to be included in the catalogue Victor Man, “Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough”, Sternberg Press, 2016
Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough
29 April – 11 June 2016
Victor Man’s painting invites to writing, requires a careful description into words, an analytical and extensive exposition, in an attempt to “translate”, to show what is seen, revealed, what comes about, what the artist basically does, his type of action and its purpose. Writing is seeing. Everything in Victor Man’s paintings is both accurate and mysterious. This is specifically why they seem to require to be integrated into a wider protocol, into a series of actions that one may assume as potentially crucial, decisive for, so to speak, the fate of European culture, of the European creator, of the Western psych-alchemy which is in crisis today – an intellection metaprotocol which must be designed precisely starting with them but bringing salvation further to an open nerve surgery.
I am not the only one who is (epistemically) addicted to Victor Man’s art, to this particular feeling that a decisive discovery is imminent upon a sufficiently thorough examination. After the 2012 Paris Triennale (Intense Proximity), curator Okwui Enwezor also invited Victor Man in the architecturally difficult Giardini “Central Pavilion” of the 2015 Venice Biennale, reserving for the artist the most particular space, which he called in an article “Victor Man’s secret room”. This exhibition resumes and continues the research showed in 2015, in Venice, presenting the audience with the opportunity of a “live”, “in real time” participation in the most exciting on-site laboratory in contemporary art.
The operation continues: like an alchemist, unselfconscious and absorbed, Victor Man continues to create his “masterpiece”. This is a series of small size works, some starting with a rather enigmatic motif or scene from Pre-renaissance painting (Trecento and Quatrocento). They only appear to be miniatures since, as the painter himself puts it, the subjects are “self-sizing”. The same appearance of scientific protocol, of Ars Magna before the separation of art from science, of physics from metaphysics and even of ethics from politics (namely prior to the apparition of “man” as a cultural and intellectual formation, if we were to follow into Michel Foucault’s “archaeology” from The Order of Things) become here straightforwardly abrupt, as the small paintings inviting the viewer closer, while actually acting as small strategic devices, small para-clinical mechanisms designed to capture the eye and simultaneously performing a surgery on the European optic nerve. Their “subjects” are, for example, small scenes; seemingly classical statues with cracked appearances that makes one wonder whether it is not his own lens, eye, vitreous body, his vision that is cracked; seemingly purely decorative animals; renowned biblical scenes from classical painting; emerging metamorphoses; forbidden unions; flagellations, etc. Contained violence that has already been visually stylised, formalised and civilised: the essence of culture, the essence of Europe.
The paintings thus “exhibit” a modus operandi, a particular and unique technical-scientificartistic protocol comprised of (if they were to be differentiated and listed) three simultaneous procedures: detail separation (most often, as already mentioned, human, animal or humananimal micro-scenes of contained or imminent potential violence that may cause unexpected grafts, hybridity, metamorphoses, evolutions and advents); small and specific frames (over-focus); and, eventually, the extremely particular de-colouring (blackening, greening, reddening: nigredo, “viridendo”, rubedo) specific to Victor Man’s art, in other words an immersion of the “subject” into a bath of “dead-water”/”live-water”, of “shadowing”, in the utmost Jungian alchemy-therapeutic sense. And the pictorial procedure may in itself be illustrated en abyme, as “subject”, through the most curious metamorphoses and adventures, just like the Renaissance columns and arches given by another of Victor Man’s obsessions, the feminine black puppet; or similar to characters that may seem to have the intention for a trans-category symbolic pollination, nearly touching each other but nevertheless stopping on the brink of the crime, on the verge of violence, in the infinitesimal antechamber of action.
It may look like Oneirism, but it is not. It may look like Visionarism, but it is not. Or one may very well say that Victor Man’s art is “oneiric” or “visionary”, but that equals to saying nothing at all. In other words, it would simply mean to avoid taking the challenge and bringing it further – as required – by a possible intellection-salvation possible scenario capable of reuniting, as mentioned, art with science and the soul or spirit with action.
In my operational vision of Victor Man’s vision, he redefines the plane of the painting turning it into an intervention and operation field: blades, lamellae, lenses, matrasses, even homunculi, Faust, Goethe, The Great Tradition, etc. Sense of sight is here both a clinical object (a patient) and an intervention subject (therapeutic intervention). Through meta-operations and in order to be operated and, through it, to be able to operate the essence, the plane of the painting, therefore the plane of vision, is transformed, operationally transmuted into a genital operation field.
And this is where the “scandal” may surge, that part that is not to be spoken of, that is even occult in Victor Man’s operations: the most advanced point of his searches. What is, for example, the operation suggested, revealed beneath our eyes in a work like “Untitled” (2014-2015) from the series “Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough”? A birth or an abortion, a saving intervention to prevent evil or, to the contrary, a malevolent termination of pregnancy – however, all transposed at a supreme historical and cultural level? What does Victor Man intend to hinder, change or, to the contrary, de-block, re-launch, reactivate in the European psychodrama?
Uterus Mundi, Regressus ad uterum: but some – and this is precisely here the absolute novelty that Victor Man grants us – purely plastic, specifically pictorial, a meta-operation (vision of sight) by which, in order to operate, the plane of the painting is simultaneously turned, at the origin of things, at their seminal level, into an uterus and into a clinical operation field.
Victor Man’s painting is alchemic, which does not merely literally mean that it might represent as “object” the historically traditional alchemic operation, or in the mere metaphorical sense applicable to any somewhat consistent work of art, according to which art is alchemy. That is not the case. Victor Man’s art is a continuation or an expansion of the great alchemical operation project by purely pictorial means, providing at a third level (meta-meta-) a vision of the history of painting as alchemical operation in itself.
Victor Man is still concerned, his work is represented by the endeavour for an alchemical ad uterum regression of painting (as privileged tool or mean of intervention on the human) and through painting (as perfected, enhanced, privileged spiritual tool of intervention on the cultural plasticity of the humane, as culture is exactly what may sublimate violence, but which requires germinal violence in order to purify itself through sublimation).
In Victor Man’s n-meta-vision, painting is in itself a re-plasticisation of things, therefore a pictorial return, re-plunge, regression, re-immersion, recovery (painting as Ars Magna) of the plasticity of the beginnings.
Victor Man’s great operation concerns the transformation of the eye into an uterus, a “calibration” and alignment, a metaphysical overlapping between the Eye and the Uterus, between the Vision and the Matrix of things, namely the operation preparing the great operation that actually blends with it, in other words which might even be non-existent: specifically the preparation of the “operation field” and of the laboratory is actually the Great Operation, the Great Art, in itself.
Victor Man operates in the depths of vision, on the eye, on the uterus-eye begetting visions on things, meaning the divine seeds, planes, sketches and croquis.
In his work, Victor Man is tirelessly and obstinately looking for the level at which one may operate, at which he may intervene through sight over the formation of things, the highly spiritual and ultimate operations level of encounter between the eye and the uterus, where painting’s plasticity is found and alchemically identified with the germinative plasticity of things and nature.
An additional proof of his pursuit and heroic advancement on his path, that Victor Man heroically and epically proves himself capable of, is the recent painting (2015-2016) titled “Early Paradise” (and actually representing a study for a “World Flag”), this exceptional painting within painting in which representation is explicitly allegoric, the illustration of the astral eggs and the ovular deformed head stretched towards the maternal breast, an egg, a tear, a bud, a drop of dew, etc., culminating with a new stage in the imagination of the de-colouring, of the “shadowing”, this time by simply effacing colours, as in a restoration work and the return, thus trans-visual, to the drawing beneath, by blotting out to the canvas as reality support that creates a flash upon the covered light, “shadowed” by history.
Victor Man’s path continues abruptly and excitingly and is one of the few “live”, “in real time” spiritual adventures with what we might probably call, for more accuracy and receptivity, cotemporary art (which, unlike con-temporary art, involves the acceptance of certain multiple temporalities, rhythms and traditions): a research open to a decisive “infra-” or “nano-” cultural level.
Bogdan Ghiu, “Doctor Man’s Laboratory (The Uterus-Eye)” – Text to be included in the catalogue Victor Man, “Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough”, Sternberg Press, 2016