FLAVIO MAN
Paintings
Illustrations
Statement
Biography
catalog
contact
©2025
This is not a collection of images. It is a field of traces, where each painting is a small disaster in slow motion. Painting is excavating chaos. What is an image today will be a ruin tomorrow.
The works here do not follow a chronological order or a closed classification. They move between collapsing cities, fragmented bodies, fragile structures, absurd scenes and jungles that devour what remains. Together they form a map of instability rather than a stable archive.
The aim is not to explain the world, but to stay inside the moment when things begin to fail. Each painting is a fragment of that failure, a remnant of the present in ruins.
THEATER OF ABSURD
The works gathered here come from different moments and tensions, but they all share the same impulse: to record the instant when structures fail, symbols break apart and the absurd becomes the only certainty.
The aim is not to offer answers, but to invite the viewer into an intermediate, unstable space, where reality turns blurry and time stops moving in a straight line. Each work is a fissure, a trace, a scene inside a theatre without a script, where figures do not resolve the situation but simply witness it, like us.
Brick falling over the head
90x70cm
2025
A flowerpot falls from above, thrown by a crow, and misses by a few centimetres. It is not a metaphor; it is chance, the absurd as the only explanation for still being here.
Brick falling on a head reflects and satirizes the fragility of life, the uselessness of grand discourses, and the violence of the everyday.
Junkie bird believes that everything is fine
90x70cm
2025
The bird seems calm, but everything around it is trembling. A sweet creature holding an invisible threat: denial as a way of existing. Everything is fine, until it isn’t
Bird king with red shoes
150x100cm
2025
An absurd and majestic figure.The king of a world that no longer stands.Yesterday he was the master, today a vagabond, his kingdom is nothing but ruins.
Useless Objects from the Future
90x70cm
2025
The objects depicted here no longer serve any purpose. Perhaps they never did.
It remembers something that never fully existed.
RUINS OF THE FUTURE
Buildings are not just structures; they are witnesses of time. They rise like abstract prisons, solid blocks held at their breaking point after carrying too much for too long. Now they begin to give way.
This is not a vision of destruction as an ending. It is about the moment when a structure is still standing but already failing, when the crack appears and something starts to fall with it.
These are not ancient ruins or futuristic dystopias. They are cities caught just before collapse.
Nubes de angustia
100x150cm
2019
Nubes de Angustia captures neither past nor future, but the instant before everything falls down. The moment where the world holds its breath, awaiting transformation.
145x90cm
2019
Tsunami shows the exact instant when structure turns into debris, a city torn apart by forces it cannot control.
Sonambulo caminando de noche
Sleepwalker at night
110x70cm
2019-2024
The world is falling apart, but he keeps walking. Between reality and dream, between what is collapsing and what has yet to form. A sleepwalker moves uncertainly through this nighgmare landscape, not sure if awake or dreaming.
Fabelas
100x70cm
2019
A precarious city built out of necessity, always on the verge of falling apart but still standing.
Escalera
90x75cm
2019
A staircase suspended between ascent and downfall; a structure that does not decide if it leads anywhere or nowhere.
CAVERN AND ECHOES
This series is a bridge between the prehistoric and the present, as if the walls of a contemporary cave were covered with the remains of a collapse. Automatic lines and faded backgrounds evoke archaeological fragments, something on the verge of being erased.
Each painting reads like an echo of a civilisation in decline. The figures are not heroes or mythological beings; they are entities caught inside the fall. They are records of human fragility in a time of acceleration and destruction, in a world that is disappearing in front of our eyes.
Cavern #1 – The Shaman of the Cave
40x40cm
2019
Cavern #2 – The Leaning Tower
40x40cm
2019
A structure caught in a permanent lean, a body or a building that has not fallen yet but cannot straighten.
Cavern #3 – The Witness of the Cave
40x40cm
2019
A face emerging from an eroded wall, more echo than portrait, looking not outward but back into history.
XXI Century Caveman II
100x70
2019
The marks on the surface are more spaced out, as if erosion had left only the most persistent traces. This is an image of forgetting in progress, where absence is as significant as presence. What was once an articulated language is now just a murmur of scattered signs.
XXI Century caveman
110x70cm
2019
Here, the cave ceases to be a shelter and becomes a time capsule, layers of history overlapping without context. The lines evoke prehistoric inscriptions, yet they also resemble the remains of a collapsed civilization trying to hold onto its own history before fading. The work suggests that the primitive and the futuristic are not opposites but cycles of the same process of destruction and reconstruction.
Saqueadores del pasado (Plunderers of the past)
90x50cm
2019
"Plunderers of the Past" portrays history as a landscape of extraction, where scattered fragments are desperately recovered, interpreted, or possessed. Errant entities excavate through ruins, collecting not just material remnants but symbols. Erratic brushstrokes and shifting forms suggest perpetual decay—a broken cartography where past and present blur into one
FRAGMENTED BODIES
Man with umbrella
2023
A figure dissolving into its surroundings, resisting and fading at the same time. The umbrella is a fragile defense, a futile attempt at shelter against an inevitable storm. He is not an individual, but an echo of human frailty, a ghost walking through the ruins of a collapsing world.
El gato
2017
25x30cm
Not just a cat but an observer, frozen between presence and disappearance, quietly watching a world that unravels around it.
Marioneta (Puppet)
2018
35x25cm
San Vito Dance
2017
A forced movement, more convulsion than dance, a body moved by something it cannot control.
selfportrait
50x70cm
2017
In Fragile Structures the world exists on the edge of disappearance. Forms emerge and disintegrate, buildings fade into dust, gestures leave only a mark before vanishing. Absence is as present as form; what remains is a brief imprint of what once was. Nothing here is stable, everything appears only as a temporary trace of uncertainty.
Portrait of a City in Spring
60x50cm
2019
A city held between bloom and fracture, its lines failing to fully connect, as if the structure itself doubted whether to grow or fall apart.
End of the winter
80x60cm
2019
This work captures the fragility of seasonal change, not just climatically, but emotionally and existentially. The desaturated palette and pigments melting into canvas reflect Berlin's prolonged winters. A city emerging from snow, a psyche emerging from winter's oppression.
Raindrop
50X70cm
2020
An ink drop falling like an abstract tear, a presence that dissolves while it appears.
Noctural wind
60x80cm
2019
A nocturnal wind plays between chaos and resistance.
An ephemeral balance between solidity and the ethereal, between permanence and transformation. Like a building resisting a storm or a gestural trace leaving its mark before dissipating.
The works in Outer Limits offer no certainties. They are thresholds into an unstable space, where reality dissolves and mutation is the only constant.
The Astronaut
100x75cm
2020
This astronaut is not an explorer; he is a castaway. His helmet is not a shield but a fragile stitch barely holding him together. His suit is a collage of broken civilizations, technological ruins, and memories sewn into his body.
Between resistance and collapse, between humanity and the machine, The Astronaut stands as a testament to modern alienation. A lost figure in an urban landscape that no longer offers a home.
The Canary
2019
At the heart of this work lies the theme of vulnerability amidst urban chaos. There is a tension between the fragility of the canary and the disorder of its surroundings, which can be read as a reflection on survival in a world on the brink of collapse.
The Canary does not depict collapse as a past event, but as a tense instant where potential ruin hangs silently in the air.
The Witch
2020
A domestic altar turned into an urban ritual, where ovens and shelves behave like ruins and the figure becomes a quiet witch of the city.
After party
2019-2024
In After Party, the remnants of the night unfold in a chaotic composition where vibrant energy collides with disintegration. Is this a memory, a hallucination, or a city that refuses to wake up?
This painting does not depict a stable world. Instead, it captures the moment of transition between states, a space where reality liquefies, and all that remains is the residue of intensity.
Open door to hidden street
2024
This painting is an invitation to step through invisible thresholds, to immerse oneself in what remains hidden beneath the surface of the city. The work captures a transitional moment, as a nocturnal breeze lifts routine's veil, revealing hidden paths, forgotten alleys, and architectures between dream and reality.
PRIMITIVE GARDEN
In Primitive Garten ruin is not a relic of the past but the ground for ongoing transformation. These images hold no romanticism; concrete cracks, the jungle devours it, scars multiply across the surface. Nature is not a refuge, it is an organism that absorbs, assimilates and distorts what remains. It is the present, the only structure that persists when everything else has failed.
Human presence fades into stains, erratic lines and expanding fissures. Architecture does not disappear; it remains as a shell that no longer belongs to us.
Human presence fades into stains, erratic lines and expanding fissures. Architecture does not disappear; it remains as a shell that no longer belongs to us.
SCRATCHES
50x70cm
2017
CEMETERY GARDEN
2017
Dragon flyng
2017
CONCRETE CONSUMED BY JUNGLE
35x25cm
2017
Song of the donkey
50x70cm
2017