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Perrotin Shanghai is happy to announce the solo exhibition Evening College by Swedish artist Jens Fänge, showcasing his charming new collection of work from 2023. Jens Fänge’s Evening College shouldn’t be an extraordinary college, however an oneiric area of sea snails, octopuses, slipper orchids, deer, cats, flutes, and extra. Right here underground actions actually occur at evening, in an limitless realm symbolizing our relation to data and the internal world. The portray Luftschloss, as an illustration, takes a marginal scene from a Göteborg suburb and turns it into a spot of perpetually evolving fantasies. In different work, the buildings are became an ocean of pink or transported again centuries, and evidently their black-windowed rooms may be additional unfolded and seen into.
In Fänge’s works, representations of structure and actual area are sometimes intertwined and deliberately confused. Utilizing inflexible wood panels to create his collages, the artist is ready to transfer cut-out characters and objects – manufactured from vinyl or cardboard – between completely different work, generally attaching items of canvas or wood panels to the background (in Europe north of the Alps, work on wood panels may be traced again to the Center Ages, when many artists used them as the bottom materials for his or her work, particularly within the Netherlands, Flanders, Germany, and Scandinavia). Fänge’s work ought to subsequently not be seen as unbiased or completed however as interconnected.
Animals and vegetation within the work occupy an equally essential place as human figures, who solely appear to achieve new data by means of their encounters with the previous. The octopus symbolizes excessive flexibility and repeatedly seems in varied scenes. The oval-shaped physique of the octopus is geometrically just like the slipper orchid’s decrease lip. Portrayed in a variety of cultures and literatures, the assorted physique elements of octopuses and orchids have impressed a wealthy historical past of interpretation. At instances related to decay, thriller, and eroticism, they’re additionally wanted by specimen collectors. The query arises why Fänge, opposite to organic details, depicts the octopus as a nocturnal creature (in Nocturne) and the slipper orchid as a night-blooming plant (in The Flower that Blooms at Evening).
Maybe it’s only within the pitch-black evening that the world reveals its thrilling aspect: it has not been absolutely understood but, and thus there’s nonetheless data to be gained, awaiting scientists to discover. We enter a room and there are extra rooms past it, situated in one other body; this outward enlargement of the need to discover is definitely isomorphic to the character of inward soul-searching.
Nevertheless, having explored the opposition between day and evening, Fänge’s college, not like the Enlightenment preferrred of “illustrious” academies, stays within the depths of darkness. We are able to strategy these objects, however finally, they continue to be unknown, inexhaustible things-in-themselves. After viewing your entire exhibition, the viewer should take into account the likelihood that there isn’t any cause for the existence of these octopuses, dolphins, shadows, putti, and rooms within the work, that this absurdity could also be a product of our obsession with naming issues and calling it data; or, much more elusively, that there could also be some hidden order between self and universe, the microcosm and the macrocosm, however that this order shouldn’t be enthusiastic about our existence and might solely be grasped negatively: the essence of the world is hidden, behind the vinyl cut-outs, behind the canvas. —Clement Huang
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