Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026
Let the World Be: Marvin Perry Mann
Fiat Mundi Confusa Ruina / Nidus ad Terram Cecidit
California painter Marvin Perry Mann fuses the raw emotional energy of mid-century Abstract Expressionism with a vision of the natural world as numinous: charged with a presence beyond the merely visible. His paintings are abstract landscapes, but they do not offer nature as refuge or passive scenery. Radiance and ruin, quiet pleasure and innate violence, order and improvisation remain present at once.
Mann organizes the exhibition through two Latin sentences: Fiat mundi confusa ruina and Nidus ad terram cecidit. In his working translation, they read, “Let the world be a confused ruin” and “Nests fell to the ground.” The exhibition title isolates the opening phrase. “Let the world be” can be heard as a command for existence or as a plea for mercy. Mann values that ambiguity.
Three distinct but related groups carry this loose narrative. The four larger Fiat Mundi paintings present a civilized world still holding the quiet joys of nature. Heavily textured in oil and cold wax medium on flat panels, they shimmer and leave visual space for interpretation. The smaller Confusa Ruina works are less heavily built, more ambiguous in their landforms, and energized by scraped teal markings. Their Latin titles invoke dust, shadow, war, truth, Faunus, and Bellona—forces beyond ordinary human scope.
Six intimate paintings of reeds and ragged undergrowth, named for small ground-nesting birds, extend the exhibition into the hallway. Gathered under Nidus ad terram cecidit, they propose that great events in the world register even at the smallest scales.
Mann uses horizon lines, relationships between land and sky, and objects on the land as a structural framework for improvisation. A ceramics comb creates recurring rhythmic marks and a distinctive shimmer. Scraping and scratching through wax and paint, he finds reeds, weeds, twisting branches, uncertain structures, and skies that come alive. The intimacy and somber hues of American Tonalist painting provide ballast to the boisterous color of Expressionist freedom.
Understood as landscapes, these works function as windows onto a world we know and carry within us, while their ambiguity opens the mind to psychic possibility. Mann’s natural world is generative and volatile, peaceful only within its own constraints, and explosively fruitful even as it consumes.
About the Artist
Marvin Perry Mann is a California painter whose work brings together abstract expressionist energy, landscape structure, and sustained engagement with the natural world. Working in oil and cold wax medium on panel, he builds, combs, scrapes, scratches, and revises his surfaces until landforms, vegetation, skies, horizon lines, and uncertain structures begin to emerge.
Mann’s paintings are rooted in landscape but do not simply describe place. He uses relationships between land, sky, vegetation, and constructed form as a framework for improvisation. His work draws on the intimacy and somber tonalities of American Tonalist painting while opening into a more charged field of Expressionist color, movement, and material freedom.