Xie Lei

Lyles & King is pleased to present Victim, the first solo exhibition in the United States of new paintings by Xie Lei.

Rendered in multiple layers of opulent oil paint, Xie Lei’s mysterious tableaux of luminous, spectral bodies entangle in foggy fields of brilliant color. The artist’s work captures and foregrounds painting’s unique capacity to bring narrative suspense and enigmatic seductiveness to isolated instants of action, setting up a fertile and visually luxuriant arena for the play of a viewer’s imagination.

It may be hard to pinpoint what strikes one more immediately upon encountering these paintings—the virtuosic liveliness of Xie’s figures’ near-3D realism or the splendor of the canvases’ incandescent pigmentation. Writing of Joseph Conrad’s vividly naturalistic yet affectively expressionist observations of life’s singular moments, Fredric Jameson once observed how the author’s “sensorium virtually remakes its objects, refracting them through the totalized medium of a single sense, and more than that, of a single "lighting" or coloration of that sense”. Nearly a century later and in the medium far more visual, the project at the heart of Xie Lei’s practice could not adhere more closely to this program as well.

Gather I presents an intimate embrace of two nude, faceless torsos that seem near-volumetric in the lively, embodied accuracy of their rendering. As elsewhere in the exhibition, the depicted figures here appear suspended in the rushing field of glowing green, imbuing the scene with a dream-logic of irreconcilable ambiguity and displaced specificity, suggestive of inter-dimensional floating or divine coruscation.

A gathering of another kind is seen in Gather II, where a flock of black birds surrounds a glowing shape whose contours were knowingly left balanced between an adumbration of a prostrate body and that of a puddle of water—a reflection of the work’s pictorial source rooted in the artist’s half-forgotten memories irrevocably intermingled with imagination and dreams

The pervasiveness of the color green throughout the exhibition, evocative of hallucinatory states, twilight haze, and the air on a foggy day, is interrupted only in Victim. Based on the episodic reminiscence of an image of women floating in water (one that may or may not have been glimpsed in a National Geographic documentary) the work depicts seven figures poised in half-submersion across the field of glowing amber, their hands wrapped around lucent orbs. The elision between the remembered and the imagined that painting alone is so well equipped to convey without spelling out is here communicated through the color’s blurring of realism and abstraction. It is reminiscent of Marcel Proust’s narrator’s imagining of the real historical Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes as not so much fully-fleshed people but as specters of concentrated color passing from one shade to another in the outlines of a stained-glass window, as the light gradually moves across its panes coloring the personages with the new hue of character and aura upon every turn.

The piece’s title, Victim, shared with the show overall, references Basil Dearden’s 1961 film of the same name whose plot follows a closeted gay lawyer and his fight against a blackmail ring—an apt story about the obliqueness of identity and identification, the performance of self, and the fiction of documentary evidence that resonates with all of the collected works’ driving ethos.

—Valerie Mindlin, 2023

Xie Lei (b. 1983, Huainan, Anhui Province, CN) lives and work in Paris, FR. He has exhibited at Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, FR; Langen Foundation, Neuss, DE; Musée National d’Histoire d’Immigration, Paris, FR; Yishu 8 Foundation, Beijing, CN; Ricard Foundation, Paris, FR; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, FR; Langen Foundation, Neuss, DE; Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis, FR; White Space, Beijing, CN; and Fondation Ricard, Paris, FR; Semiose Gallery, Paris, FR; Meesseng de Clercq, Brussels, BE, Mendes Wood DM, Sāo Paulo, BR among many others. His work is held in public collections including Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL), Vitry-sur-Seine, FR; the Colas Foundation, Montreal, CA; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong, CN; and X Museum, Beijing, CN. He has an forthcoming solo exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR in Fall 2023.