Jens Fänge: Cri de Coeur
Swedish artist Jens Fänge excels in creating subtly understated yet emotionally charged territories that merge abstract space with the human figure. His composite paintings and nested assemblages are often integrated into murals with vanishing points so elusive that they induce vertigo. Conflicting angles, crooked floors, and tilted walls make for fragmented interiors that seem neither two- nor three- dimensional. These ambiguous zones are inhabited by partially or fully rendered figures that gaze out from framed portraits or appear like cut-out protagonists in a puppet show or a shadow play.Paintings within paintings suggest stacked narratives and layered time. As our conditioned mind attempts to read the various elements, proportions, and perspectives in logical order, we find ourselves at an impasse. This is because Fänge, like the Cubists a hundred years ago, acts in tactile space rather than in visual space. As beholders, we must give ourselves over to the maze and suspend ordinary spatial perception.
The booth space at West Bund Art and Design 2019 functions as a private room yet the door has been unintentionally left open for everyone to step in. Fänge's protagonists appear in configurations that seem at once random and meaningful, suggesting a certain consistency. Viewing them can feel like a furtive, even voyeuristic act—as if we were spying on the shreds of someone's dreams, daily scenes and thoughts. The simple and universal figures in the paintings invite the viewer to witness people walking, sleeping, and dressing; lovers embracing. Stories seem to hang in the air, but no linear narrative can be deduced. It's as if the beginnings and endings of each pictorial tale perpetually occur at the same time, afloat in a larger and nonspecific realm of geometric abstraction.
On one side of the booth is the artist's mural, with its large blocks of colors. The orange angle highlights the image of a woman's gaze, shedding light on the idea behind all the paintings: the subtle and open relationship between the viewer and the object. Everything is seeing and we are part of that perceptive chain. Black and white portraits are floating on both ends of the mural, as if struggling against the undertow of passing time and fading memory. They seem like momentary glimpses at our transient individual existence, the blink of an eye in the space-time continuum.
Observing humans' everyday minds, the viewer is able to see thoughts running in every direction, much like the spatial lines in Fänge's paintings. Our thinking is rarely linear and focused; thoughts split and turn, get wrapped in other thoughts, and are derailed by memories, projections, and emotions. It's not a clear picture. If Fänge's paintings are snapshots of the mind space, they attest to our wanderings yet also to our potential for equanimity and stillness.
Perrotin represents these artists: