Victor
Man

The paintings of Romanian artist Victor Man (b. 1974) constitute a repertoire of enigmatic fables, melancholy portraits, and contemporary vanities. Lights and shadows rival and complement one another in often small-format paintings that are tinged with symbolist and surrealist accents. Man’s body of work incessantly explores the broad divergence between the ordinariness of our everyday lives and the grandeur of the universal. Abounding in references to the old masters, his artworks play with opposing forces such as the attraction to seductive painting and the repulsion of our obsession with death.

A melancholy, crepuscular palette renders his subjects both odd and touching. Man summons stereotypes from art history in our present, such as the Romany, marginalised figures who have become central in modern mythology, or the stylisation of violence in Western religious paintings, to which he alludes directly in the darkened copies he makes of Italian Pre-Renaissance works. Victor Man’s paintings seem to murmur to us that the present cannot be broken off from the past.