In Victor Man’s installations and paintings, the copresence of text and image along with subtle visual clues encourage the viewer to shed light on what might be happening. The subjects in the paintings, emerging from semidarkness, quasi-invisible and fractured, are often reminiscent of certain figures and archetypes found in works written by Shakespeare, Joyce, or Pound, among others, and offer a dialogue between the pictorial and literary arts. Laura Pavel writes: “In Victor Man’s self-contained paintings, which appear as metonymies of embodied meaning, there is no ostentatious first-order visuality over second-order textuality. Sometimes, there is a circular movement of what is readable and what is visible.”

Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough is an artist’s book focusing on Victor Man’s series of paintings that were first exhibited as part of “All the World’s Futures,” 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and later developed for a solo exhibition at Galeria Plan B, Berlin (April 29–June 11, 2016). The book includes essays by poet and translator Bogdan Ghiu, curator Mihnea Mircan, and literary critic Laura Pavel.