To say that Man is preoccupied with death is to make a poor joke. What the artist and the gallery punter share, however, is a profound fear of an unknowable reality. Man, the painter, spent decades coming closer than many to life’s ends and its beginning; his portraits, rendered in rich emerald (or copper), capture men, women, and infants faced with their finitude. Not always, all be it, willingly.
This constellation has Man draw himself into art history’s top trumps: there’s a Vincentian self-portrait, starry night in a Gypsy girl’s hair, with a bunch of (moon?) flowers for good measure. Skulls abound, as do breasts bared for feeding, as though to complete some cycle.
But there is no end in sight, and that’s the rub; Man’s other dealer is down the road, this show’s key painting unsold since the last one. If ‘life’s death’ is what he captures, might the painter’s palette – only a small nudge of the colour wheel separates his work from Tretchikoff’s infamous portrait of the Chinese girl – be but a gimmick?
