Victor Man: Eyelids, Towards Evening

The solo exhibition Eyelids, Towards Evening was curated by Eugenio Re Rebaudengo, with the below critical text by Alessandro Rabottini.

The solo exhibition Eyelids, Towards Evening brings together twenty works created by Victor Man over the last ten years and offers, for the first time, an exclusive focus on the genres of portrait and self-portrait, genres that have assumed a profound relevance, over time, within his pictorial practice.

Together with images of the artist himself, these paintings contemplate portraits of people who have entered his life, both affections close to him and encounters from the past: thus, an interior and autobiographical narration is composed that manifests an essential trait of Man's work, that is, the notion that the most intimate matter of art is individual existence together with its poetic transfiguration.

Immersed in a light that is mostly crepuscular, these figures are captured in absorbed and contemplative attitudes, or portrayed in moments of abandonment and affectionate proximity: they seem to inhabit a profoundly human time and space but, at the same time, withdraw from the current world.

This coexistence of familiarity and distance, of observation of appearances and magic of circumstances, is the space in which these works welcome the viewer, a space in which real and individual features are immersed in the twilight of indefinable moods and psychological conditions such as the evening moment–​​the passage between day and night–to which the title of the exhibition refers. Eyelids, Towards Evening evokes, in fact, not only a phase of the day perceptible as a threshold, as a space of metamorphosis–the one in which light gives way to darkness–but also the passage between sleep and wakefulness, the condition in which the forms of daily existence gradually transform into symbolic and dreamlike features.

The arc of human existence and the repertoire of affections is contemplated in its entirety, from the experience of birth and parenthood (as we find in R with Turtle and in Rózsa Victoria) to the advent of detachment and death (Father), passing through the survival of the memory of the deceased in the soul of those who remain (Self-Portrait at Father's Death).

That the presence of death is a natural dimension of human existence–a dimension both organic and spiritual, which modern sensibility tends to censor and exile in a purely clinical dimension–is one of the aspects that gives these paintings the quality of elegies, if we consider the elegy a form of poetry that, from Latin antiquity, has persisted in modern literature as a lyrical composition inspired by personal events and with a tone of melancholic celebration.

Victor Man recovers, within his pictorial language, the archaicizing quality of this poetic genre and thus explores the contemporary possibilities of a mystical vision of things and human events, where with the term "mystical" we contemplate the possibility that there exists a glimmer, in the mundane guise, of something that is not mundane.

Hence, once again, Victor Man's insistence on the principle of a widespread coexistence of things among themselves, first of all the persistence of the past in the present expressed through a style that absorbs multiple references to the history of art, from medieval and Renaissance symbolism to the recovery of primitive imagery present in Expressionism and Surrealism.

The masculine and the feminine also coexist in a regime of mutual simultaneity, if we look at the subtle androgynous quality of works such as the Untitled of 2012 and 2013, in which the features reveal an osmosis of different identities that open up and complicate the very notion of portrait. But what coexists in Victor Man's art are not only the different dimensions of time and the forms of feeling but also, and above all, the dimensions of human existence, which contemplates in its course eroticism alongside spirituality, affection alongside its renunciation, resemblance alongside mystery and strangeness.

–Alessandro Rabottini

Learn more at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.