After a large exhibition of Valentin Oman’s work in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška organized in 2004 by Milena Zlatar, the painter donated 62 of his works on paper and canvas to the Museum. Among them were his two exemplary works, Ecce Homo, from 2003. At the centre of all of Oman’s work we find the human. The characteristic monumental verticals of his images try to elude some numbed memory and seem like an open, unfinished cartographic scheme of impressions – of human lives and destinies. Oman’s figures are not laid bare, but are rather enveloped in themselves. They represent damaged images of bodies that are unable to retain their dignified subjective stance. They are only shadows, shells of bodies in metaphorical depictions of the everyman, elevated to represent the awareness of the holiness of (each) life.

Text: Marko Košan