_{Image courtesy of Galerie Perrotin}

Jens Fänge. Sister Feelings at Galerie Perrotin
Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong
From 19 January 2017 to 10 March 2017

Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong is pleased to present “Sister Feelings”, the second exhibition dedicated to Swedish artist Jens Fänge, following “The Hours Before” at Galerie Perrotin, Paris last spring, with a new series of 17 panel paintings. Somewhere at the crossroads between the early 20th century practice of collage and the ancient art of shadow play, Jens Fänge has developed a surrealistic matryoshka-like aesthetics, which consists of assembling paintings within paintings.

_{Image courtesy of Galerie Perrotin}

A master of eclecticism, he precipitates an entire hierarchy of genres into his composite works, converging iconic portraits, still lifes, domestic interiors, cityscapes and landscapes with geometric abstractions, all of which he renders using a variety of mediums and materials such as oil paint, pencil, vinyl, cardboard and fabric on panel. The contoured, often cut-out protagonists of the artist’s refined pictorial plays appear as if drifting into these multiple stage-like layers of representations overlapping each other, which give rise to an intricate, possibly endless maze of shifting perspectives not only within each composition, but also within each series taken as a whole.

_{Image courtesy of Galerie Perrotin}

Indeed, Jens Fänge’s praxis revolves around the notion of shifting perspectives. He would like us to imagine that all the compositions of his series depict a single scene as if remembered by different people, perhaps on different occasions, ultimately from different points of view, although of course this is never literally the case. When preparing a series for a show, Jens Fänge doesn’t complete one painting after another. He works on all the compositions at the same time, which he spreads out onto his studio’s floor. The backgrounds of his panel paintings usually receive an abstract dynamic rendering of colorful planes or geometrical forms colliding, which gives a hint of three-dimensionality.

_{Image courtesy of Galerie Perrotin}

As much as the viewers’ impulse is to fancy possible whereabouts for the protagonists drifting into these intricate mazes of paintings within paintings, Jens Fänge’s narrative developments, if there are any, are inherently perspectival. Whether within or beyond reach, mere vanishing points polarize his representations and with them, their subjects in and out of their frames. Speaking of which, as one may notice, the tips of some cut-out elements sometimes slightly overlap the edges of the panel paintings. In doing so, they bridge, even so discreetly, the illusory and physical worlds. As a consequence, one might rightfully wonder whether the viewers themselves wouldn’t be the ultimate part of Jens Fänge’s pictorial plays, that is, wandering souls shifting their points of view from one piece to the next in search of lost points of convergence.

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