‘His paintings keep their secrets’: the uncanny visions of Victor Man

Memory is fallible; it can be slippery and perplexing. James Joyce knew this when he wrote Ulysses, reconstructing the Dublin of his youth from afar by a tremendous act of creative will, transforming the city into a dreamscape of his own imagining.

The artist Victor Man does a similar thing when he combines recollections of his childhood in Romania with found imagery to create paintings that are immensely strange and worthy of close attention. ‘I would like to stay in a place of shadows,’ he once said, and this is where Man’s art exists, nudging at the edges of his country’s difficult past.

Born in 1974, the same year in which Nicolae Ceauşescu declared himself president, Man grew up in Cluj in Transylvania, a liminal region that had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until it was ceded to Romania after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

The Romania of Man’s childhood was one of deep paranoia — a place of silences and double-speak, where one thing meant another — and it is this uneasy balance between two worlds that he articulates so well. One of the artist’s key themes is metamorphosis, the transformation from one state to another, and his paintings feel both supernatural and inert: men stare into space; women repose; a crouching figure with a horse’s head is suspended in a nebulous otherness. This is life, but it is a strange and unknowable one, painted in a dense green wash.

Man came of age at the end of the Cold War. He studied at the Academia de Arte Plastice in Cluj and then in Jerusalem. On returning to Romania, he became associated with a group of painters loosely known as the Cluj School — Adrian Ghenie, Șerban Savu, et al — artists who articulated the uncertainty of life after the fall of communism in dark, sultry tones.

His breakout year came in 2007, when his small-format paintings were chosen to represent Romania at the Venice Biennale. Critics described them as ‘eerie and memorable’. Seven years later, he was named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year. ‘His paintings keep their secrets,’ wrote the author Friedhelm Hütte in the catalogue.

This enigmatic quality is achieved by Man’s practice of using pre-existing images sourced from magazines, news reports, novels and works of art, which he isolates from their context. Literature is particularly important to the artist, and the above mention of Joyce is not incidental. Man has referenced the great modernist as an influence, even signing some of his paintings with the initials S.D., for Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Offered in Post-War to Present in London on 26 June 2025 is The Chandler, one of Man’s most psychologically layered works. Painted in 2013, it depicts a woman who appears to be compressed by the surface of the painting. Her knees are clenched tightly together to one side and her head has been severed by the frame and placed in her lap. The eyes are open in a kind of reverie, and she seems to be growing a pair of horns. The Romanian poet Bogdan Ghiu wondered if the figure was — as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze would say — on the verge of becoming something else, falling prey to becoming an animal.

The painting echoes a passage from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head or death-mask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an iron crown.’

Man has made several versions of The Chandler, six of which, including the one offered for sale at Christie’s, were exhibited at Galerie Neu in Berlin in 2013. Seen together, these repeated pictures are not a Pop-art celebration of mass production à la Andy Warhol, but an allusion to a much older history of religious iconography. Icons are seen as conduits to the afterlife, and Man’s paintings seem to trace this fundamental human quest to make contact with the divine.

The uncanny atmosphere of The Chandler echoes the paintings of the Belgian Symbolists Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville and their dreamlike visions of loneliness. Perhaps, in all its primordial otherness, The Chandler is a work about desire and the human need to illuminate the darkness, no matter what might be lingering there.

Post-War to Present takes place on 26 June 2025, alongside Post-War to Present: Online (17 June to 1 July), with viewing at Christie’s in London, 19-24 June

Also on show is 75 Years of New Contemporaries, a private selling exhibition, until 14 September 2025