Désarroi

Following a solo presentation at Caprii last year, Sies + Höke is delighted to present Désarroi, Xie Lei’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Ten new paintings and twenty-two works on paper open a door into a world where things are in a turbulent state of disarray. The term chosen by the artist for the exhibition title symbolises more than just chaos and disorder—Désarroi means collapse, dissipation, decay, defeat, and disorganisation; it can describe mental confusion or deep consternation. Indeed, today it tends to refer to these inner states of distress rather than the material conditions it signified in the nineteenth century. This is in keeping with the artist’s oeuvre, since Xie Lei does not paint everyday moments, choosing instead to depict these exceptional states and moments of transformation. The figures he sculpts out of the dark background of his canvases with his brush and his own fingers have no clear gender or determinable age. They are, as he himself says, more like phantom figures or anonymous beings. They are difficult to grasp, but they interact with each other in a way that is far from casual. What we see on these canvases is of a captivating intensity. People—or are they ghosts?—seem to be engulfed in flames, melting together in acts of love or violence, embracing each other and holding their heads together in a kind of telepathic exchange.

In Absorb (2025), two figures bend over a reclining figure with its face turned upward and lips open—either in a moment of ecstasy or of a deep, highly personal, perhaps even frightening realisation. Another painting, Penetration (2025), shows the head, overstretched neck, and chest of a figure from a bird’s-eye view. Dark hands rest on their pale chest; from this perspective, they could easily be the viewer’s hands. Are we witnessing an act of sex or the last rites of a dying person? Xie Lei does not disclose this to us; his canvases preserve their mystery and with it their power.

“It’s about the ambiguity of human relationships,” he says. “Controlling and being controlled.” Despite all their ambiguity, the chiaroscuro effects of the paintings draw the viewer in magnetically. The paint is applied thinly, never thickly. The brightness that shines out of the darkness is not white paint, but the pale canvas. “Sometimes,” explains the artist, “I use the analogy of a screen, where the brightness comes from behind the image, or of cinema screens, where it is projected onto them.”

By scraping away applied oil paint with his fingertips, Xie Lei also establishes a direct physical contact between artist and work. He inscribes himself into his paintings through the gestures and traces of his own body. The series of works on paper on the third floor, Premonition, is hung in a row that appears to continue through the partition wall. They feature heads with open mouths and closed eyes. Are they dead? Are they asleep? The vertical brushstrokes make them seem as if they are falling yet simultaneously floating, which is heightened further by the intense blue tones. Other works resemble X-ray images: however, unlike an X-ray, where impenetrable matter appears as white, here it is the removed paint that is rendered visible: in other words, the absence of painting.

The exhibition title came to Xie via a detour through a contemporary German novel. Verwirrnis (Confusion) by Christoph Hein was published in 2018 and chronicles the lifelong love story of two men living in the societal constraints of the GDR who have to keep their relationship secret for decades. The exhibition is not directly related to the novel itself, according to Xie. He draws inspiration from literature as well as cinema and dance, looking everywhere for ideas. “I believe that being a painter means seeing and absorbing things that I don’t produce myself—borrowing something, perhaps even stealing it, all while still remaining myself.” Fundamentally transformed by the painting process and amalgamated into new contexts of meaning, these paintings look as if they have sprung from the artist’s dreams. In fact, the source images are a highly diverse assortment that Xie gathers from the internet, recalls from his own observations and memories, or cuts out of newspapers. We have all been living in a world of visual overload for a long time now, but most of these images pass us by without leaving a trace. As an act of selecting and editing, painting creates an image that is parallel to its physical source material, articulating it in its own words, so to speak, instead of merely regurgitating it, and, in Xie’s case, documenting the states in which the figures find themselves. The presence of his own hand in his work and the tactile aspect of his paintings are important to him, says the artist. “If we can feel something, then we can believe in it. If we can’t touch something, we can’t believe in it. I think this is a very interesting element to explore.”