The Paris-based painter Xie Lei (Chinese, born in 1983) works with ambiguity and mystery, aiming to create in his works a new enigmatic reality. Taking existing situations as his point of departure, Lei would use his imagination, combined with his extensive knowledge of Western art, and apply tropes from Baroque to Romanticism to paint mesmerizing contemporary images.

Lei prefers the nocturnal setting, since the night is, for him, the time when sexuality and identity can be truly lived. His oil paintings, dark and luminous at the same time, offer this tension of disclosing true human nature in moments of violence or ecstasy, or showing the tense moments before and after such a rupture.

The painting Dormeurs (2020), as the title already suggests, presents sleeping men, or perhaps dormant human beings caught between sleep and wakening, ghostly waiting for something to happen. For the artist, it is all about the moment of transition that is so captivating for him, because it can lead to something new. Transition though confrontation with the self is also the subject of Narcissus (2021), which takes up the Greek myth of falling in love with one’s own reflection, only to question what self-love, suffering, and pleasure is. In the puzzling world created by Xie Lei, the viewers are given great freedom for interpretation, but the questions they are confronted with are often uncomfortable and disturbing.

Lei uses his painterly skills to play with tradition of abstraction and figuration. The subtle pinkish-white cloud covering the sleepers’ bodies forms a large abstract patch that claims almost two-thirds of the painting. Lei works with visible and distinguishable brushstrokes, a clear, controlled composition, and a very characteristic selection of colors that he enriches with light. Perhaps being an immigrant triggered, for him, the possibility of inventing other worlds, when escaping the real one sometimes seems like the only option.