Victor Man: Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough (Multilingual Edition)

Romanian-born artist Victor Mans (b. 1974) layered, moody and atmospheric installations and paintings bring to mind the work of 18th-century landscape painters who used black mirrors known as Claude mirrors to turn colors into dark key tones. Figures in Mans paintings emerge from semi-darkness, fractured and quasi-invisible, reminiscent of archetypes in works by Shakespeare, Joyce or Pound, and suggest a dialogue between the pictorial and literary arts. As literary critic Laura Pavel writes, In Victor Mans self-contained paintings, which appear as metonymies of embodied meaning, there is no ostentatious first-order visuality over second-order textuality. Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough is a handsomely illustrated artists book presenting Mans series of paintings exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and developed for the solo exhibition at Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2016). The softcover publication includes essays by poet and translator Bogdan Ghiu and curator Mihnea Mircan. Mans work is shown in the U.S. at the Gladstone Gallery, NY and Blum & Poe, L.A., and was included in the SF MOMA exhibition Open Ended (2016).