If you only see one art exhibition this spring, make it Swedish painter Jens Fänge's Sister Feelings, showing at Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong (until March 11), comprising 17 panel paintings created in 2016. And eye-catchingly topical stuff it makes too. You won't discern the exact likeness of the late great David Bowie, but his presence resides in one of the images, or even two. Music and Fänge it transpires, are close bedfellows - the show is named after a former punk album by the band that became Simple Minds. And in a remarkable coincidence, the Bob Dylan-loving Fänge was asked by Stockholm's legendary Nobel Peace Prize organisation to produce an artwork for Dylan's Nobel Diploma. (All Nobel Prize winners receive diplomas with commissioned pieces of art).

Fänge's shifting perspectives, points of view and intertextual references don't make for easy explanation, but do create intrigue, storytelling and provocative symbiosis. It's tempting to view each work as a short story, or narrative game of 'what happens next', or 'what just happened' prior the image in question, but Fänge likens them to "singles on an album". Either way, in each language or listening, or viewing or watching - a series of inter-states we seem to flit between when we stand in front of Fänge's work, this latter-day Pieter de Hooch-like panel-ism makes for the most fantastical parlour game of picture reading. 

Fänge's work echoes that of others; he's sometimes compared with Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, whose painting felt as though he were transcribing dreams, though the Swede's work feels more dream as drama, or theatre of the absurd. His assemblage and collage can feel Henri Matisse-ian, his colour palette Andre Derain-ian, his rainbow whisps of colour Wassali Kandinsky-esque or his random patterns the Kasimir Malevich-ian syntax of Suprematism. The relief in the work Kurt Schwitters, the suspense not un-Hopperesque, the perspective Edvard Munchian, a Hockney-an photo splash, his upended - and suspended - figures Baselitzian, his emphasis on found objects Alberto Burri-an. But high or low, fine art or commercial, painterly or post-modern or pre-and-post-pop, Dadaism or Dutch Golden Age, his work has a kind of all-schoolism about it. Strangely the work reminded this writer most of Jan Van Eyck and The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), distinguished by its use of a mirror which reflects the artist's subjects from the back and even hints at the presence of the Flemish painter.

Whatever the surrealistic matryoshka-like aesthetics, the paintings within paintings, the composites, iconic portraits, still lives, domestic interiors, cityscapes and landscapes of geometric abstraction, rendered in oil paint, pencil, vinyl, cardboard and fabric on panel, look out for the work above, Arrivals, which feels for all the world as though Munch's early 20th-century Scream subject has departed his/her haunted bridge and reappeared as cut-out retrospectively gazing back over the last 100 years from the democratised and domestic mis-en-scene of a living room wondering what all the fuss was about - not unlike the passage of art over the same period. Subtle and tantalising, once seen, you won't get this soundtrack out of your head.   

IMAGE: Jens FÄNGE, Arrivals, 2016. Oil, vinyl and fabric on panel 65 x 54 cm. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

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