Terms such as conundrum, enigma, mystery impregnate what Romanian-born artist Victor Man has carefully created over the past thirty years - terms which provide a dead end for interpretation, like a foggy wall of darkness. Executed in slow motion, his works started out with assemblages, installations, objects, photography, books - and gradually condensed into what centres the oeuvre today: a painterly cosmos of dark glimmering stars or rather, extremely dense pulsars carrying an ethereal weight, from which pathways open to understand what has shaped the artist's life and work.
Man claims to be an artist "living and working in Europe." By invoking Europe, he signals a cultural space that transcends exotic projections onto Romania, allowing his home to exist beyond tiring post-Communist clichés or the devastations of the Ceauşescu era-a period that Man, born in 1974, witnessed during its decline. His work is still populated with shimmering primaeval frag- ments from this area's turbulent pre-modern past, but after graduating from the University of Fine Arts in Cluj during the 1990s, he first left the continent. He went studying at the Jerusalem Studio School, an idiosyncratic institu- tion emphasising technical skill in image-making by stoically sidelining the conceptual grandeur associated with figures like Marcel Duchamp.