Perrotin Tokyo is pleased to present Parlour, an exhibition by Jens Fänge that invites us into a world of echoes and fragments—a domain that feels less like a room than a shadow of a room. The term parlour itself reaches back to the Middle Ages, when in monasteries silence was absolute, save for the parlour, the sole room where conversation could resume. Here, Fänge’s parlour becomes a private, domestic theater where people, animals, and ordinary objects appear like half-remembered scenes, familiar yet spliced and rearranged, as if he has reanimated an interior world from elsewhere, conjuring it through a kind of painterly alchemy.
As an introduction to the show, Perrotin shares a conversation with Fänge about his meticulous, layered approach to image-making and the winding process that brought him to Parlour.
Perrotin: What is your approach to painting? Tell us about your process and the order in which you create.
Jens Fange: I approach the painting in a humble way. It’s a game: Sometimes I’m in charge; sometimes the painting is leading me. I see the canvas as a conflict zone. The composition can explode, implode and collapse. My job as an artist is to do the counter-work—to find harmony and balance in the chaos. When the contradictions reach an equilibrium, the painting comes to life.
The process is intuitive. Often when starting I really don’t know where the work is heading. I continue to alter the composition, the colors, and the content throughout the length of the painting. It’s a bit like tuning a piano.
Since each painting consists of several parts, I can’t hang them on the wall initially; instead, I place them directly on the floor. I have to watch my step when walking between panels and details scattered all over the studio floor. I sometimes climb a ladder to get some distance and a proper view of the objects. Usually, I’m working on several pieces simultaneously. That allows me to play around; for example, I am currently moving around a small portrait painted on a wooden panel between several paintings before I will settle on a final composition. Using this method, the paintings get acquainted with each other and form kinship, a wholeness.
The choice of material is also of great importance. To give the work tension and contrast, a glossy varnished piece, for instance, can meet a matte surface of dyed linen. It’s a bit like playing with a dollhouse and turning it into a theater where my role as the artist is shifting between being the director, the actor, the stage designer, and the audience.
P: Your work often features a childlike figure. Could you tell more about that?
JF: The child is there to remind us of innocence: an aspiration to approach the world as if experiencing it for the very first time. It’s also a way to connect with the feeling of playing or fooling around, which I regard as serious business.
P: Is the sacred important to your work? And what about animals, do they hold significance?
JF: The sacred aspects of my paintings have less to do with religious beliefs and more to do with an astonishment for life itself. My main reason to surround a face with a circle of light is to emphasize the features, to let them stand out against the background. But, at the same time, I do embrace the possibility to approach the radiant disk as a halo, a representation of spiritualty and suggested enlightenment.
When including animals in my paintings, I let them play the role of the trickster. They, I imagine, simultaneously depend on their human masters, but also are sovereign, free from rules and restrictions. For me, the work must contain enigmas and meanings that are partly obscured, even from me the artist. I like to stay curious and surprised by the composition.
P: The backgrounds in your paintings are either abstract, domestic interiors, or urban landscapes. How do you decide the setting of the painting?
JF: I approach the backgrounds in my paintings as the field between the abstract and the representational. At a given point in the painting process, I let go of the need to make sense of it. I let the colors take over and treat the motif as something purely abstract.
P: Are there any specific sources of inspiration for your compositions that you would like to mention?
JF: I pull my source material from a wide range of images—cartoons, photos, newsreels, cinema and art history. I borrow a lot at times. Other times, I just make them up myself.
P: For the first time, some parts of your works are created in ceramics. Can you tell us more about that?
JF: I was invited to work at a ceramic studio in a rural town in the south of Sweden, Höganäs. It was really interesting to approach a material so different from painting. At first I didn’t have a clue what to make out of it. But when I started to think of the clay as a way to make three-dimensional painting, the fear of the material kind of went away. I particularly liked using oxides and pigments to color the works. After all,I’m a painter, not a sculptor.
P: How is your art practice connected to Japan?
JF: When I was an art student in the 1990’s, I got the chance to participate in an exchange program with an art school in Kanazawa, Japan. It was an overwhelming experience. Bidai, the art school, was mainly focused on traditional Japanese arts and craft. I remember meeting a master of urushi-e (lacquerware). Studying this method—of adding layer upon layer to a certain object—really affected me. The perfection and the seductive smoothness of the surface contained a depth and existential weight. It blew me away.
P: Why did you choose the title Parlour for the exhibition?
JF: I wanted an architectural term. Parlour—meaning living room—suggests a domestic, everyday environment. Rooms often play an important role in my paintings. It’s the scene where the drama unfolds. I like to think of the walls, floors, and ceilings as something that defines and limits us, capturing and putting a frame around the protagonists. The room becomes the prerequisite for letting my painted figures take place in the world. I like to explore how the perception of the characters oscillates between how they are suppressed by the architecture’s geometrical structure, and then, on the other hand, how they regain agency and let go of the limitations of geometry and gravity. The use of the word parlour originally comes from monasteries during the Middle Ages, where monks were not allowed to speak except when they entered a special room known as the parlour.
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