Blum & Poe, Tokyo, is hosting an enthralling exhibition of new and recent works by artist Victor Man.Born in 1974 in Cluj, the Romanian painter Victor Man’s exhibition has a combination of a focused selection of small-format portraits and still lifes with a common symbolic or allegorical character. The artist’s intimate paintings place themselves in a surreal, colorized interspace, giving an appearance as though a color filter were scattered over them. Close links between the exhibited works is formed by canvassing the state somewhere between sleep and reality. It also lends a certain artificiality where sharp contours stand out against a background that appears unrelated, or where strong blue shadows lay around the figures. Plant and human life combine together in similar conflicting ways, as do the architectural and the living beings, where at the same time they demand a life of their own as painterly forms. This fusion and separation of elements produces a bandying back and forth of forms of seeing and perception.The human journey via chronological age and the changes that come with it is inscribed across the works. As both “Self Portrait[s]” at “Father’s Death” and “Self with Father” lays down the starting point for the works is Victor Man, further reference can be taken from drawings of a Raphael self-portrait of Man’s grandfather and Man himself as a child. Despite all their character, they show the image and the artistic work to be a surface for projection and a field of orientation. From utter aloofness to loneliness, from early childhood to the grave, these different stages shift between presence, anticipation, and memory, incorporating the motifs into a symbolic and referential universe.The exhibition is on view through December 22, 2017, at Blum & Poe, 1-14-34 Jingumae Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0001, Japan.For details, visit: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/galleryguide/blum-and-poe/overviewClick on the slideshow for a sneak peek at the exhibition.
↧