Victor Man: “In un altro aprile”
Studio Martinotti
via Francesco Denza, 19 / a
00197 – Rome
June 26 – September 1
The solo exhibition of Victor Man entitled “In un altro aprile,” is programmed at Villa Medici from 26 June to 1 September 2013. This is the last step of the series of three exhibitions curated by Alessandro Rabottini focusing on the theme Academy.
The work of Victor Man explores the history of painting and representation conceived as a place where memory, fiction and amnesia are stratified, a place dense with shadows and mysterious atmospheres, where things exist in a state of perpetual motion.
The exhibition at Villa Medici presents a series of recent paintings as well as works – never shown before – which Victor Man had realized during a two-month sojourn at Villa Medici. Indeed, the installations realized by the artist consist of single works that mutually interact in a dialogue: seen together they suggest the possibility of multiple narrations while not establishing univocal meanings or paths. If at the beginning of his career the painting of Victor Man had evolved from the elaboration of found photographic images – and from which the informative or narrative content were removed – in more recent years the artist has concentrated on the invention and development of an autonomous iconography in which frequent literary references intermingle with his own biography. Literature and history of art, collective memory and personal experience are the elements woven together by the artist into a non-linear story where distinctions between present and past, fiction, imagination and reality are abolished.
This overlapping of points of reference runs throughout all the works displayed in this exhibition: the fusion of gender, androgyny or, more generally, the uncertainty of physiognomy and appearance form a recurrent theme, which strengthens the image of an identity in perpetual movement and suggests how rich and mysterious the essence of things can be beyond their appearance.
Uncertainty and oscillation between gender find an echo in other forms of transition: from human to animal, organic to artificial, face to mask.
