Victor man

‘The contemporary,’ wrote the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ‘is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but […] its darkness.’ For the Romanian painter Victor Man, such atemporal darkness is a signature style. Like other painters hailing from Cluj – Adrian Ghenie and Serban Savu among them – Man foregrounds a melancholic vision tinctured by his country’s totalitarian history. Yet unlike them, Man’s sensibility displays a more otherworldly, and at times psychoanalytic, dimension coursing with subterranean energies. His show ‘Flowering Ego’ at Gladstone Gallery delves into these dark waters with the artist’s characteristically enigmatic aplomb.
Inspired by Rilke’s first and second Duino Elegies (1923), the exhibition brings together eight allusive works. R with Turtle (2018) pictures the artist’s infant daughter; the painting’s delicately scumbled surface vibrates with jade greens and snowy white textures. While the turtle in front of the swathed newborn lays on its back, the child holds a ring, conjuring regal depictions of the infant Christ. Weltinnenraum (2017), Rilke’s term for the space of inner emotion, shows a young woman emerging from an architectonic background painted in subtly variegated shades. Behind her, a decorous symbol pierces the work’s planes with resonant ultramarine and viridian, as foliage and the profile of a fox inscribe its right edge. Confronting us from within the frame, the woman is at once familiar and forever removed, hovering indeterminately between past and present, portrait and allegory, likeness and memory.