Victor Man Blum and Poe April
28 - May 26, 2012
Blum & Poe is pleased to
announce The White Shadow
of His Talent, the second
solo exhibition at the gallery by artist Victor Man. With this new series of paintings
and arrangements of images and objects, Victor Man creates
non-linear scenarios that are loosely based on nine fictional texts
forming the book If Mind
Were All There Was. Man
commissioned writers, curators, and artists to write texts revolving
around the figure of Giuseppe Sacchi, a 17th Century Italian painter
who gave up his profession as an artist to become a Franciscan monk
and died young. Sacchi left no evidence of his work and further
information about his biography does not exist. One of the few,
supposed traces of his life can be found in the Basilica di San
Francesco in Arezzo, where his name appears in the form of graffiti,
added at an unknown date by an unknown hand, on the forehead of a
horse depicted in Piero della Francesca’s cycle of frescos The
Legend of the True Cross,
completed in 1466. The figure of Sacchi is seen as a metaphor to
explore issues of ambition and failure. His almost non-existent
biography could describe Man’s interest in the motif of the artist
as a lonely being and his fate of self-exclusion from the world.
Taken as a whole, Victor Man’s
work is a tour de force
into the multiple dimensions of memory. For every image that is
carefully evoked from the recesses of history, there are many others
that are plunged into the slippery abyss of remembrance and amnesia.
With texts by Maria Fusco, Massimiliano Gioni, Martin Herbert,
Francesco Manacorda, Tom Morton, Alessandro Rabottini, João Ribas,
Torsten Slama, and Martin Vincent, Man conceived If
Mind Were All There Was
as a chance to re-think the making of art history as a series of
acts of inclusion and denial. The texts are accompanied by
collaborative drawings Man realized with artist Andro Wekua.
Victor Man’s exhibition The
White Shadow of His Talent
is a dense orchestration of images and words, history and fiction,
and light and darkness. As in the majority of his works, Man
explores painting as a site where knowledge and consciousness are
caught in a perpetual state of motion; things are remembered and
forgotten, and change appearance. Their location in time is never
fixed and continually repositions itself.
As it often happens in Man’s
oeuvre, multiple references are twisted in a complex web. The motif
of the horse, such as the one vandalized in the frescos by Piero
della Francesca, is echoed in the title of a series of massive,
stone slabs: Places,
Lodgings, Company,
2011-2012. Presented alongside the paintings, Places,
Lodgings, Company refers
to the often-told episode of Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental collapse
in 1889. Evidently while in Turin, the German philosopher witnessed
the whipping of a horse, after which he threw his arms around its
neck and fell into a state of mental illness. In both cases – the
vandalization of the image in Arezzo and the flagellation witnessed
by Nietzsche – the horse becomes a metaphor for an extreme state
of empathy, the medium to express deeper forms of non-verbal
connection between human beings and the world. Furthermore, Man has
carved eyes into the stone slabs and filled them with colored glass,
a decoration partially
derived from a building in Turin with
nuances taken from the painting The
Flagellation of Christ
(ca. 1455–1460) by Piero
della Francesca. These eyes reinforce the concept of “inscription,”
as does graffiti onto fresco and flagellation onto flesh.
Victor Man (b.
1974) lives in Cluj, Romania and Berlin, Germany. His work has been
the subject of solo exhibitions in public institutions, including
the Centre international d'art et du paysage Ile de Vassivière;
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam;
Hayward Gallery, London;
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; and GAMeC, Bergamo. Man represented
Romania at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and participated in the Busan
Biennale in 2008, as well as a number of thematic exhibitions,
including the Kunsthalle Lingen and Kunstverein Lübeck (in a two
person exhibition with Dan Perjovschi); Contemporary Art Center,
Vilnius; Arnolfini, Bristol; Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle; Frac des
Pays de la Loire; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; and the
Kunstverein, Hamburg. The artist is currently having a solo
exhibition at the Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean,
Luxembourg and will participate in Intense
Proximity, the Triennale
in Paris, curated by Okwui
Enwezor. He will also be
part of a group show titled Six
Lines of Flight curated
by Apsara Di Quinzio at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in
Fall 2012.
http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/victor-man#images
