Victor Man: The place I'm coming from
Victor Man (b. 1974) was brought up and still lives in Transylvania, a province of Romania, but one with deep historical ties to Hungary where Man’s maternal ancestors are from. In his first major solo exhibition of painting assemblages and wall drawings, Victor Man brings together disparate references to the place he is coming from, and the physical and mental isolation that implies.
Man’s work is scarred by traces of memory, and fragmentation, both geographical and ideological. Obscure and tangential links in subject matter come together to create a new narrative. All the images are captured and recycled so that his own changing world cannot disappear. Brought together out of context each image reformulates itself to create as Man describes it, a “terrain of turbulence. Where truth becomes a matter of clues”.
In one assemblage of paintings, a costumed female Santa walks over the bodies of prostrate men, and Dorothy’s red shoes glitter with a fetishistic menace. ‘This Wizard of Oz’ was produced in the free world of the USA in 1939, the same year that Hans Frank obliged Poland’s Jewish population to wear the badge of the star of David, and Romania’s Prime Minister Armand Calinescu, a steadfast adversary of pro-Nazi movements, was assassinated by the anti-Semitic, fascist Iron Guard.
A major wall-drawing will take up the second space of the gallery, recreating on a magnified scale a comic-book drawing that Man drew in 1984 when he was ten years old. Western comic books were impossible to find under the Communist regime, and yet other children often had them, “for me it always remained a mystery where their parents procured them from. So these drawings were born from that sort of need, similar to that of collecting empty coca cola or beer cans, found in hotel trash cans.”
The story of a Knight who unified the three provinces of Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia that now make up modern Romania. Stories of this kind of national hero were repeated often on the two hours of daily television aired in Romania in the 80s. His legacy is a problematic one, is he regarded as one of Romania’s greatest national heroes, yet with the support of the Hungarian nobility of Transylvania was beheaded in 1601.
As in the paintings, whether images of men buried in snow, or dark hooded figures with faces obscured, there is always an undercurrent of violence, viewed with perfect detachment as if from under a smokescreen.
An artist’s book, with an essay by Barry Schwabsky, will be published by Timothy Taylor Gallery in conjunction with Galerie Annet Gelink, Amsterdam and Johnen + Shöttle, Cologne.