When Riddle Meets Fable
An 18th century diver; a whirlpool of ink and hammered paper; a stainless bowl turning the world upside down and outside in. In his variation of grayscale moments Dan Wirén has found a path into a meditative world populated by the shadows and remnants of civilization, whether captured in a blob of ink evocative of psychoanalytical tests or in a black figure asking the same question to each viewer – What Am I? Collages of images sourced from his own urban walks as well as open-source streams from around the world, carefully collated and printed on rice paper, similarly inquire into our personal pools of references and reflections.
Over the past three months during his residency at IFP, Dan Wirén has been engaged in a series of parallel investigations. Daily rituals of painting, washing, drying, observing and collecting have turned into a body of work that attempts to accommodate impressions of his own existence - in China and in the World. Most of time he stays in his temporary studio inside the old courtyard pavilion which is now the IFP Studio. Every day he works in front of a big table with papers, fibres, soot, ink and water. On the wall he pinned paintings and photos with tiny magnets; scattered in the room there are objects he picked up somewhere I his daily walks or weekly travels.
Painting means treating matter, creating traces of actions, dots and lines, blunts and smudges, reactions on the matter itself. The world and how it enters the field of observation is the landscape spread around me. Inside me. My works have always been more of a journal than a manifestation. A running line of happening in which I later can create a slightly different order. Create confrontations between different strata. Investigate connections between things I first thought had nothing to do with each other. I find myself working like a filmmaker making cuts and montage in a kind of 'life-movie'. Where meaning increases at the border between in- and out-side, in the actual cut.
- Dan Wirén
When Riddle Meets Fable opens this Saturday November 14th at four o'clock in the afternoon.
At half past four there will be a reception in the IFP Studio, you are cordially invited.