‘Man puts together art history, personal life, religion, sex, and the subconscious on canvas, refusing to discard anything vague, to obliterate obscurity, and to counter instead the dissimulated rational clarity and theoretical pride of so many advanced artists.
Fully melancholic, cold but contorted, Victor Man shuns anything jocular, anything that solves problems in an illuminating way. Until recently he had to cover up this Romantic embrace of the purity of the soul and the ensuing damnation by disseminating cultural allegories with fabricated cognitive clues, inside of which an actually obscure, muddy subjectivity thrived, impenitently bathing in nonsense, abjection, and anxiety. The blacks only signaled the dark path through memory, oblivion, obliteration and objectless nostalgia. A true anti-Gauguin, Victor Man found Tahiti right in his studio, inside nearby museums. Folded textiles replaced ripe fruits, lead moonlight replaced the scorching sun.’
E. Kessler, ‘Every Lead Evening’, in Victor Man, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Neu / Cologne: Walther König, 2020, p. 18.
