Jens Fänge

Jens Fänge’s oneiric assemblages don’t let the eye rest. The sharp angles, distorted views, dazzling patterned floors, and saturated colors of his interior spaces create the sense that every element must be seen at the same time. The mind doesn’t rest either—various art-historical references to the 1920s reverberate in each composition. Slanted walls and curved archways invoke the work of Giorgio de Chirico; layers of images and materials recall Georges Braque and Kurt Schwitters; and floating, embracing figures evoke Marc Chagall. These labyrinthine chambers are full of visual echoes, and like the theater of dreams or a moment of déjà vu, what we’ve seen before takes on a peculiarity that is both absorbing and unsettling.

The drama of the work isn’t lost when scaled up. The byzantine perspective of Journey’s at Home (all works 2015–16), a life-size painting of a domestic interior on two adjacent walls, pushes and pulls simultaneously. Fänge is a sly trickster: The figurative elements in this piece are doubly framed, imprisoned as works within works, more ground than figure. And the viewer becomes implicated; the painting is a stage on which to project one’s own body. Further resonances come from a striped pattern in a picture frame, an arrangement that recalls the Dazzle camouflage used on battleships in World War I (Within). In another room hangs Hinterland, a model ship whose hand-embroidered sails repeat the design, a call and response from the well-constructed dream to an eloquent reality.