Jens Fänge: AURA

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Perrotin Hong Kong is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Jens Fänge in Hong Kong since 2017, featuring a body of new paintings as part of greater mise-en-scene that will transform the gallery itself into a human-scale composition.

When Walter Benjamin wrote of art’s waning “aura” in his seminal 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he was referring to the unique “presence in time and space” that is lost in the replicated image. In taking Benjamin’s concept as the title for his latest solo exhibition at Perrotin, Jens Fänge challenges his audience with a mind-bending conundrum: what does presence mean when time and space have no fixed reference point? What is the aura instantiated in his complex collages and assemblages, with their anachronisms and dizzying perspectives?

Often exploring the relations between people and architecture, Fänge’s surreal compositions hint at profuse art historical influences, from the darkened archways of Giorgio de Chirico and the steely portraits of Tamara de Lempicka to Georges Braque’s faceted forms and Wassily Kandinsky’s colourful intersecting shapes. Yet Fänge seldom incorporates overt references, deferring instead to the vague and generic. What we see are impressions of art historical tropes— snatches of geometric abstraction in the pattern on a figure’s jumper, a picture of a Renaissance-style infant Christ on the wall of a domestic interior. Disparate styles and genres collide and converge through these cleverly painted elements and frames within frames, locating the work at once everywhere and nowhere. The parlor game of spot- the-reference leads to dead ends in the reality of our cultural canon but draws us deeper into the diegesis, prompting us to dispense with the certainty that anyone we think we recognize even exists in the universe of Fänge’s characters.

Even more puzzling are the diffuse boundaries between subject and object, figure and ground. Although one might expect Fänge’s architectural settings to lend a solid structure to his compositions, they are more often characterized by paradox. Walls in the painted background melt in bleeding pools of ink and oil. The illusion of depth is undone by collaging miniature paintings on card or copper over corner seams and doorways. Fänge occasionally adds contrast by conflating interior and exterior, for example by including a painting of a tree or a facade inside a cramped room.

Fänge’s characters, meanwhile, are awkward occupants of these spaces. People are typically truncated and flattened, reduced to floating heads or partially painted bodies. These cut-outs intrude rather than inhabit, hovering like apparitions in stairwells and rooms, or opening stark voids amid densely patterned abstract backgrounds. Conversely, in works where the background has sparsely colored sections, a painted arm or tufts of hair might come to the fore while the rest of the person dissipates into the blank wall or floor.

Still other works rely on incongruities in scale to estrange characters from their settings, shrinking a room or facade so the legs of the overlaid figures dangle beyond the edge of the space, as if they are walking in front of an artificial backdrop. More disconcerting is when the architecture is superimposed onto the figure, as in works where characters’ eyes are eerily occluded by small images of an alcove or basement steps.

Looking at the multitude of overlapping elements in Fänge’s surreal compositions, it is impossible to parse their relative positions and associations. Does the alcove-eye suggest a secret locked in the character’s mind? Does a person embracing a blank cut-out feel longing or loss? Is an upside-down man stuck beneath a giant female head a figment of her imagination?

These ambiguities derive from the free-associative circumstances of their creation. Invoking the undirected creativity of play, Fänge collates various painted backgrounds, materials, and cut-outs on the floor of his Stockholm studio and experiments with different chimerical configurations. Irregular shapes can be pieced together and painted to form a face; human cut-outs can be rotated to suggest peaceful repose or a headlong plummet. Fänge’s process is one of motion and transmogrification, and it is this boundless dynamism that is imprinted upon his dioramas. There are no conceptual or narrative strictures here, only tangled associations for the beholder to unravel according to their own projections of narrative logic. The works are enigmas even to the artist himself, a dissociation between the conscious and subconscious self that evokes what psychologist Kelly Bulkeley described as “the autonomous otherness of dreaming.”

The clearest sense of continuity stems from the recurrence of motifs. A room with an off-white door and tiled wall reappears with variations in palette, scale, and occupants. Near-identical people and animals populate multiple settings. More radically, the means by which characters enter the scene can alter: a group of friends in one assemblage are framed in a small picture-within-a-picture elsewhere, perhaps indicating an unseen photographer who captured the moment. These repetitions are like spatial-temporal footholds, allowing the viewer to organize the visual elements into a semi- coherent history in which people visit places, keep mementoes, and refurbish homes. Yet this is an unreliable history spun by conscious reasoning and subconscious instinct.

The intertextuality extends beyond the picture plane in Fänge’s exhibitions, where murals and custom carpets echo elements in the works. Aura features posters of a facade photographed from the artist’s studio, but digitally altered so the windows are blacked out like the panes in a displayed painting of a house. The viewers are thus invited to step into the unfolding dramas of his mysterious mises- en-scène. If Fänge’s works can be said to exude a kind of aura, it is one structured not by the materiality of the aesthetic experience but by the unstable logic of a half-remembered dream, elusive even as it manifests before us.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Born in 1965 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
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. A master of eclecticism, he precipitates— so it seems—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.

Fänge’s works have been exhibited many times in Scandinavia, including at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo, the Gothenburg Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art - Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Fänge’s paintings have been included in international exhibitions, such as at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson (USA). His works can be found in the collections of the Swedish Museum of Modern Art - Moderna Museet and the Magasin 3 in Stockholm or at the Gothenburg Museum of Art; as well as in private collections such as a permanent installation at the headquarters of H&M in Stockholm, or in the collection of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.