Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Victor Man is not an artist to be approached lightly, as one might for an exhibition of floral paintings in a neighborhood gallery. His dark and mysterious pictorial universe demands special attention, a willingness to lose oneself in his visual labyrinths where human identity fragments and recomposes into enigmatic tableaux that refuse direct reading.
Born in 1974 in Cluj, Romania, Victor Man emerged on the international art scene at a time when Eastern Europe began to assert itself in the world of contemporary art post the fall of the Wall. Widely discovered in 2007 at the Venice Biennale, his work has for twenty years explored the virtuosic obsessions of a representational painting that questions as much as it affirms. But do not expect easy explanations, Man cultivates ambiguity as others cultivate their garden.
His painting evokes a persistent twilight, an in-between where forms emerge in a reduced palette of blacks, deep blues, and dark greens. One could speak of an aesthetic of mystery, but that would be too simple. It is rather a visual archeology where each layer reveals as much as it conceals, where collective and personal memory intertwine in a constant play of references.
The Romanian artist practices a subtle art of diversion, taking images from various sources, media, art history, popular culture, to empty them of their initial meaning. As he explains himself: “I often use images that have a certain specific meaning in the media. Emptying them means that I do not choose them for their ‘value’ but for their representational potential as images, in order to build new content with them” [1]. This process of decontextualization creates a visual universe where the viewer is confronted with incomplete narrative fragments, interrupted stories that stimulate the imagination without ever fully satisfying it.
During his first solo exhibition in the United States, titled “Black Hearts Always Bleed Red”, Man deployed this strategy with remarkable effectiveness. The installations, composed mainly of paintings and prints on acetate in atmospheric grays, floated on the walls like relics of secret societies, disconnected and adrift in the white spaces of the gallery, impervious to the viewer’s gaze. In other words, Man’s images are not devoid of history, but they refuse to reveal it. Most are appropriated from media sources, chosen to “provoke the viewer to seek their own recognition” and for their potential to mutually influence each other, a strategy that breaks with previous narratives that might linger in the individual image [2].
Man’s pictorial style is soft and subtle, evoking the similarly dreamlike images of Luc Tuymans. For both artists, fine attenuated layers of paint graze the material of the canvas, so that the subject remains integrated into its own ethereal surface. However, Man’s work refuses the definition that places Tuymans’ subjects in a broader historical narrative. Instead, it strikes precisely at the point where meaning begins to crystallize [3].
This tension between revelation and concealment runs through all of Man’s work. It joins what Jacques Lacan, in his essay presented at the 16th International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in 1949, identified as the founding moment of the ego’s formation in the mirror reflection. Identity, as Lacan understood it, was born in the recognition of the image as oneself. Essentially, the representation of the human form in art has followed the same model: by playing the role of the mirror, the work of art replays the moment of recognition in an exchange that ultimately reassures the viewer [4].
Lacanian psychoanalysis offers us a relevant key to approaching Victor Man’s work. If identity is formed in the recognition of the specular image, what happens when this image is fragmented, obscured, made partially invisible? The human figures in Man’s paintings are often decapitated, masked, or partially visible, as in the series “The Chandler” (2013), where a woman whose head has been deliberately cut off from the upper part of the painting holds a head, presumably her own, on her lap, subtly modifying her position in enigmatic variations in other paintings. Man extends this surrealist tradition of the acephalous to equally sinister heights that unfold in similar works such as “Untitled” (2012), where the head of a young man is largely covered by the fist on which it rests, a fist that also serves as a base for a black skull that partially prevents the young man from seeing beyond [5].
This disruption of the specular image creates a fissure in the process of identification, a space where identity becomes unstable, fluid, open to multiple interpretations. It is precisely in this space that the power of Man’s work resides, not in the affirmation of a fixed identity, but in the exploration of the infinite possibilities that open up when identity is questioned.
But psychoanalysis is only one of the many possible layers of reading Man’s work. His Heideggerian tropism is certainly not insignificant, considering the existent as a “being thrown there” on a horizontal plane whose parallelism with others underlies a vertical shift of its horizon line. Silhouettes and faces overlap, agree, and multiply in the features of others that memory confuses, in a manner certainly less involuntary than expected. The temptation arises to reconstitute a mental and personal heritage by inviting the viewer to dive into the layers of representations, to read behind the shadows and before the veils the multiple mixtures that make each of the figures, each of the artist’s memories, a chimera that continues to haunt the present [6].
The existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger, with its concept of being-in-the-world and its analysis of anguish as a revelator of our fundamental condition, finds a visual echo in Man’s paintings. Solitary figures, immersed in twilight atmospheres, embody this existential condition where the human being is confronted with his finitude and the absurdity of his existence. But unlike Heidegger, Man does not seek to resolve this existential anguish, he explores it, dissects it, transforms it into an aesthetic experience.
Man’s works are imbued with a dark atmosphere tinged with melancholy, in which underlying concerns associated with personal identity, collective memory and the sacred, as well as violence, the mystical and the erotic [7], intermingle. This thematic complexity translates into a pictorial approach that defies easy categorizations. His style, complex and difficult to categorize, reveals many references to art history while simultaneously representing a unique position in contemporary painting.
Taken one by one or as a whole, Victor Man’s works release snippets of unfinished stories, stimulating the free associations of viewers and causing a certain disorientation. As the artist himself explains: “I avoid giving a definitive status to my works. I like the idea of gently penetrating things and keeping a certain distance. If things become too explicit, I add another element that upsets their coherence” [8]. This ambiguity is apparent in Victor Man’s relationship to the images that serve as starting points for his works. Removed from their context, these images are “emptied” of their initial meaning and take on other, more subliminal levels of meaning.
But do not be mistaken, this refusal of explicit meaning is not a nihilistic gesture. It is rather an invitation to a deeper, more engaged form of attention. As Neville Wakefield noted in his interview with the artist for Flash Art: “It’s interesting what is contained in a signature, the amount of information. I think about how artistic identity is condensed. The way perhaps people understand Victor Man’s work as belonging to, or being representative of a certain type of painting or a certain type of installation. It’s interesting to what extent all this information is contained in the signature, even when the signature is a style” [9].
This idea of signature as style is particularly relevant for understanding Man’s work. His dark palette, his fragmented figures, his cryptic references to art history and literature constitute an immediately recognizable visual signature. But this signature is not a mere personal mark, it is a complex visual language that allows the artist to explore fundamental questions about identity, memory, and representation.
The exhibition “The Lines of Life” at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which presents about twenty works by the Romanian artist from the last ten years, is dedicated to Man’s artistic focus: portraits. In deeply dark greens, blues, and blacks, he creates portraits as sensitive as they are enigmatic, dominated by an existentialist, dark, and introspective tone. Subtle influences from the pre-Renaissance, dense with metaphors, emerge in Man’s melancholic imagery [10]. These portraits are not faithful representations of real people, but rather explorations of the human condition, visual meditations on what it means to be a subject in a world where certainties crumble.
The title of the exhibition, “The Lines of Life”, is a quote from Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “To Zimmer” (1812) and refers to Victor Man’s close link with poetry and literature. These references, as well as links with his own reality of life, are regularly found in his painting, for example, the individuals portrayed in the portraits of the main part of the exhibition come from his family environment and his circle of friends. Immersed in mainly dark scenarios and with a contemplative gaze, the models are enveloped in an existential heaviness. The paintings testify to an intense exploration of human existence and speak of the poetic and tragic ambivalence of life [11].
This literary and poetic dimension is essential for understanding Man’s approach. His paintings function like visual poems, where each element is loaded with multiple meanings that resonate with each other. As in poetry, meaning is not given directly but emerges progressively, through an active process of interpretation that involves the viewer in the creation of meaning.
I see in Victor Man an artist who renews contemporary figurative painting by plunging it into the troubled waters of the collective unconscious. His pictorial technique, of almost surgical precision despite the darkness that bathes his compositions, testifies to a mastery of the medium that goes far beyond mere technical virtuosity. Each brushstroke contributes to the construction of a coherent universe, where the visible and the invisible intertwine to create a visual experience that challenges our perceptual habits.
Victor Man’s work has for twenty years questioned the virtuosic obsessions of a representational painting. The Max Hetzler gallery presented the artist’s first solo exhibition in its Parisian space [12]. Without an introductory word, preferring to use a text by Georg Trakl to any description of his work, Victor Man maintains the mystery by anchoring the dissonance of his universe in tradition and historical references, where additions and transformations blend into divided characters [13]. This strategy of mystery is not a mere marketing artifice, it is an aesthetic and ethical position that refuses excessive simplification and the rapid consumption of art in the era of image overproduction.
If the spiritual dimension comes to the fore, flesh and complexion are nevertheless just as prevalent in his work, testifying to a thought closer to poetry, more open to the image, to language, than enclosed in the mystical. Enclosure, however, is always a question with this artist, little inclined to publicity, fundamentally marked, in his adolescence, by the figure of Van Gogh; a liberating impasse in the years of the fall of the Soviet Union, while his country was experiencing a revolution in 1989 [14]. This biographical reference sheds new light on Man’s work, his predilection for dark and melancholic atmospheres can be read as a response to the historical and political upheavals that shaped his youth.
Reversing the paradigm of symbolism while drawing from its repertoire, Victor Man’s shift is illustrated by an essential reversal; subverting the transmigration of organs to that of souls. Through the encounter of bodies, the power of objects, the flesh becomes a receptacle of attributes that weigh on it and can be read no longer in the secret of the gaze, in the invisible gravity of emotion, but in the imbalance that memory makes bear, in this advent of the “wobbly” contaminating, through perception, our own posture in the world [15].
This idea of perceptual contamination is decisive for understanding the impact of Man’s work on the viewer. His paintings are not simply objects to be contemplated from a distance, they involve us, destabilize us, oblige us to reconsider our own position in the world. As critic and curator Mihnea Mircan noted in his essay “Eyes Without a Head”, Man’s spatial incisions and dissections disturb the construction of perspectival regularity: they reveal its artifice through another artifice [16].
Following the argument of Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, anamorphosis unites the ultimate strangeness of the materiality of painting and the mathematics of perspective itself, indicating that mimetic images, no matter how naturalistic, require a cognitive leap to resolve the relationship between a mathematical rendering system and embodied vision. Perspective is an unnatural mathematical method of light simulation rather than a practical model of vision. By explicitly denying the “correct” viewing position in front of a canvas, and in the case of Man, the elucidation of what is represented, anamorphosis excludes the possibility of fully aligning the human gaze with the geometric parameters of an image [17].
This use of anamorphosis as a structuring principle of the work places Man in a long tradition of artists who have explored the limits of visual representation. From Hans Holbein to Marcel Duchamp, via Salvador Dalí, anamorphosis has been used as a means to question our perception of the world and to reveal the conventions that govern our understanding of reality. But Man goes further by combining this technique with an exploration of the dark areas of the human psyche, thus creating an art that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally disturbing.
Art critic Tom Morton called Man a “shape shifter”, highlighting his ability to constantly transform his approach while maintaining a recognizable stylistic coherence [18]. This constant metamorphosis is not a sign of indecision or lack of direction, but rather a deliberate strategy to avoid artistic fossilization and maintain the openness that characterizes his work.
Man’s works capture atmospheres, offering the viewer only ambiguous and vague clues, leaving them in the blur. They also render a memory of images and objects composed of different layers of time, which seems to oscillate between disappearance and reminiscence. Victor Man’s very personal poetics and the illustrative diversity of his production trace the contours of an artistic world in which historical facts and subjective impressions from different worlds and periods are anchored [19].
Victor Man has a preference for painting in dark colors, which reminds us of the 18th-century landscape painters, who used black mirrors, also known as “Claude mirrors”, to transform colors into shades of gray. This technique creates a distancing effect that places the viewer in a position of detached observer, thus reinforcing the enigmatic and introspective character of his works.
Man’s extremely meticulous work plays with symbols and slips many traps into its interstices that disturb the initial reading and offer a painting that resists the test of self and others, tempted by the sublime and definitively contemporary [20]. This technical meticulousness, combined with conceptual and referential richness, places Man among the most significant artists of his generation.
Victor Man thus appears as an artist who skillfully navigates between tradition and innovation, between historical references and contemporary sensibility. His work, deeply rooted in questions of identity and memory, offers a visual reflection on the human condition in the era of fragmentation and uncertainty. As he himself stated in his interview with Neville Wakefield: “The work is more like a mirror; it can only continue as long as you look at it. It’s the best thing that ‘killing time’ can offer, its reflection, and you can always turn away” [21].
In a world saturated with instantly consumable and immediately forgettable images, Victor Man’s paintings invite us to slow down, to look carefully, to lose ourselves in their enigmatic depths. They remind us that art, at its best, is not mere decoration or entertainment, but a transformative experience that confronts us with ourselves and the world around us, in all its complexity and ambiguity.
- Victor Man, Mudam Luxembourg, 2012.
- “Victor Man”, Frieze, 2008 edition.
- Ibid.
- Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, 1949.
- Javier Hontoria, “Victor Man”, Artforum, 2013.
- “Victor Man, Galerie Max Hetzler, Point de vue”, Slash-Paris, 2022.
- “Victor Man”, Mudam Luxembourg, 2012.
- Ibid.
- Neville Wakefield, “Victor Man”, Flash Art, 2016.
- “Victor Man : The Lines of Life”, e-flux, 2023.
- Ibid.
- “Victor Man, Galerie Max Hetzler, Point de vue”, Slash-Paris, 2022.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Mihnea Mircan, “Eyes Without a Head”, in “Victor Man: Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough”, Galeria Plan B, 2016.
- Ibid.
- Tom Morton, “Shape Shifter”, Frieze, 2008.
- “Victor Man”, Mudam Luxembourg, 2012.
- “Victor Man, Galerie Max Hetzler, Point de vue”, Slash-Paris, 2022.
- Neville Wakefield, “Victor Man”, Flash Art, 2016.
