Victor Man

Victor Man was born in 1974 in Cluj, Romania, and currently lives and works between Berlin and his hometown. He belongs to a generation that grew up in the 1980s, during the austere period of Ceausescu's Communist regime in Romania. This time significantly influenced his adolescent imagination and creativity, as well as his initial artistic training before relocating to Berlin. Isolation and censorship shaped his artistic practice, leading him to seize upon anything that was out of reach, either by observing it or, if possible, recreating it.

The works of the Romanian artist, characterized by a cold and dark chromatic palette, are imbued with a strong introspective charge, constantly balancing on the threshold of interpretations that simultaneously announce and refuse any possibility of reading. At the beginning of his artistic career, Victor Man's painting was developed from the processing of photographic images drawn from reality, from which informational and narrative content was removed. Only later did the artist focus on the invention and development of an autonomous iconography, within which frequent literary references blend with his own biography. Literature and art history, collective memory, and personal experience are the elements with which the artist weaves a narrative that does not follow a defined chronological line, abolishing the distinctions between present and past, fiction, imagination, and reality.

However, a constant in Man's oil paintings is their indebtedness to the figurative, yet devoid of any explicit reference to escape superficial readings. Each painting serves as a place of transition: he enjoys creating visual enigmas rather than providing interpretative solutions. With every narrative element stripped away, the only way to understand these canvases lies in the need to find a mediation between painter and observer, both called to accept the indecipherability of things behind their illusory permanence. Moods, elusive memories, visual fragments, and dreamlike impulses intermingle in a fluid and allusive reading, where each presence invokes an absence.

“I am interested in painting from the perspective of a kind of continuity in the History of Art. For at least fifty years, doubts have been incessantly raised about painting's ability to progress. But perhaps it is precisely its marginalization that will bring it back to the center; this agonizing condition is strengthening it. I am interested in what could give it a different meaning. I think we are only at the beginning of a process of redefining painting.”

The work in Giuseppe Iannaccone's collection, Untitled (2011), features a young figure lost in thought, with an expression that suggests a moment of introspection leading to deeper reflection. The painting, enveloped in a melancholic atmosphere, evokes aspects of Picasso's blue period, filled with solitary figures in which the world is internalized. The face is androgynous, uncertain in its features and appearance. This theme reinforces the image of an identity in perpetual motion and suggests the richness and mystery of the essence of things beyond their appearance.