CHEN FEI – THE DAY IS YET LONG

Posted on 2016-03-28

What Chen Fei’s paintings are concerned with is certainly not any kind of grand theme. His expertise is the choreography of the scene. Those scenes of daily life could not be any more common but, because of tedious detail and character arrangement, often bring out a compact tension and an unexpected sense of drama. Chen Fei has an almost paranoid discipline towards detail: wallpapers covered with blossoming flowers, lush and expansive forests, thick, flowing hair… Chen Fei mechanically traces every line and every nuance without care for how much paint, effort, or time required. Because of this, he injects a strong sense of realism and the feeling of a film still into his work. Viewers standing in front of the canvas often back away out of discomfort. However, in spite of this, they are often still “kidnapped” into speculating on the canvas’ psychological narrative and characters.

Chen Fei’s works have been mostly autobiographical. Railing against politics while at the same time lampooning morality, Chen Fei also likes to mock himself. In the series of works of all the same size (180 x 240 cm) that we are exhibiting this time, he often imbeds himself in the paintings as characters: as a bare-chested shop owner leaning on the counter in a slightly offensive manner (Hornet, 2013), as a completely naked man covered in tattoos (I am the Jungle, 2015), surprisingly, as a worker displaying frustration at his just-completed sexual performance on the production line of a state of the art automated car plant (Lychee, 2015), or as ‘police officer’ standing intently along a lake with a leg up on the railing next to a scantily-clad female pan-handler (the last piece of this series, The Day is Yet Long, 2015)… Chen Fei mocks himself without mercy. A backdrop of obvious nudity and images of genitals signify lust, ugliness, etc. as a kind of abstract experience.

Opposite – Romance of the Mute, 2014

Exhibition runs through till April 30th, 2016

Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne
No. 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang,
Chaoyang District, PRC-100015
Beijing
China

galerieursmeile.com

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JEAN CHARLES – BLAIS SIMULTANEOUS

Posted on 2016-03-28

The comparison of works from different periods, which simultaneously work on different levels, is a common practice in the work of Jean Charles Blais. His work is informed by the diverse application of the medium, by using the couture as drawing or painting. With the help of digital media, billboards and other graphics emerge.

An earlier exhibition by Jean Charles Blais, which was shown in 1998 in the Bawag Foundation, already brought together two levels of his oeuvre. The series of works “sur mesure” (“Tailor-Made”) is half object and half sculpture. It creates a hypothetical wardrobe, which has been reduced to fragments and arranged on large black surfaces with paint and chalk. For his current exhibition in Vienna, Blais has expanded his body of work through the presentation of large format paintings, new cut and rearranged posters as well as gouache paintings. These new works fit into his figurative repertoire, whose fascination lies in the various layers of paper. It seems that the memory of forgotten forms, which were present in early works from the 80s, have been rediscovered. The polysemy arises through incessant metamorphoses, which play with the staging of the body and ambiguity. Forms are created, which arise from the concurrence of depth and surface – modern, unique, consistent and elusive.

And so the theme of this exhibition is the connection of these individual forms and their interaction. One looks for the empty forms, which emerge as memories of an absent body only to immediately disappear again.

Opposite – 10 5 15, 2015

Exhibition runs through till May 14th, 2016

Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna
Weihburggasse 26
A – 1010 Wien
Austria

www.galerie-mam.com

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ANDY WARHOL – SHADOWS

Posted on 2016-03-28

Known for his appropriations of popular culture and advertising vernacular, Andy Warhol is synonymous with Pop Art. In the second half of the 1970s, however, Warhol became increasingly preoccupied with the darker side of mass culture. With precedents in works like his Electric Chair series, Warhol’s aesthetics of repetition shifted from a critical celebration of Madison Avenue marketing to moody studies of existential concepts like absence and mortality. His Still Life, Hammer and Sickle and Skulls series from the 1970s use shadows to accentuate contrast. As a result, the subjects of these series – and many of his self-portraits from the same period – are thrown ever deeper into abstraction. 


Exhibition runs through till April 23rd, 2016

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.honorfraser.com

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