Victor Man

In Victor Man’s self-contained paintings, which appear as metonymies of embodied meaning, there is no ostentatious first-order visuality over second-order textuality. Sometimes, there is a circular movement of what is readable and what is visible, and a mutual deconstruction of the limits of both – as in a “third-order metapicture.” Man’s often-enigmatic works could be considered, to a certain extent, to qualify more as “infrapictures” than as “metapictures.” As such, they seem like the pictorial equivalents to the “micrograms,” that were written almost a century ago by Robert Walser in such tiny handwriting as if they belonged to a private secret code, apparently indecipherable. The mysterious darkness, which adds to Man’s singular visual “voice,” alternates with a certain phosphorescent or at least translucent, ethereal atmosphere.

(Excerpt from Laura Pavel, “On Diving into Artistic Potentiality – the Infra-gaze of Interpretation,” in: “Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory,” Vol. 1, Oct. 2015.)