Art Plural Gallery presents Excess, the joint exhibition of Chinese artist Fu Lei and American artist Dane Patterson.

Fu Lei, born in Beijing in 1958, celebrates the excess of sensuality and desire conveyed through massive bodies’ volumes and flesh disproportions. Picturing unusual scenes echoing classical Greek orgiastic feasts, Fu Lei sets lust as a value in a world emphasizing the ambiguousness of human nature.

“The inspirations of my creation come from the freedom of not fixing my mind on any culture, region, pattern or even species. Only a free and open mind can stimulate endless imaginations.” – Fu Lei

These intimate visions present an interesting dialogue with Dane Patterson’s interior scenes.

Dane Patterson, born in 1978 in Indiana, features familiar people and objects displaced from their usual context. Absurd or unreal scenes reveal the fragile balance of so-called routine. Dane Patterson’s excessive disorder undermines fixed and limiting definitions.

“The act of repositioning the familiar reads as an act of violence or at least the evidence of such. A toaster is designed to rest on a surface in a particular manner, and when placed on its side it reads to us as an error.” – Dane Patterson

Fu Lei and Dane Patterson’s imaginary worlds both unfold through seething mosaics of animals, human beings and objects in disarray. Paper is saturated with elements of all kinds from plates to clothes, jellyfishes to ladybirds, dialoguing without hierarchy or distinction. Abundance triggers a poetic overflow sometimes slipping away from the frame as if pointing out boarders of another reality.

Both artists insist on the slowness of the creative process and the freedom of precision conveyed by pencil on paper. Tightly articulated, Fu Lei and Dane Patterson’s detailed compositions also relate to photography in their realistic style, staged montage and studied arrangement. Whereas some artworks by Fu Lei are digital prints, Dane Patterson works in two steps by translating the photograph into a drawing. Both dystopias are visualized through the lenses of an obsessive quality and intensity.

Nonetheless, both artists describe two different sides of a twisted reality. Whereas Dane Patterson unfolds the landscape of a black and white vandalized space, Fu Lei introduces a colourful palette and creates a living flying fantasy in his oil paintings. A sense of loss or desire articulates each artistic speech, as two different propositions of an imaginary world characterized by its excess.

Image: © Dane Patterson, Art Plural Gallery