Dogs of Dark marks a substantive new exhibition by Xu, which probes the ambiguity between human and canine bodies, drawing on themes presented in a recent
collection of visceral poems created during time spent in New York City. Referring to this body of work as inhabiting a space that is visually positioned between
these elements as potentially dream states, offering a glimpse into the psychological underpinning of anthropomorphic figures within mysterious scenes.
The consistent link together: it serves as a functional aspect in Dogs of Dark, a realized suite of paintings, a salvo of fragmented images. Similar behavior, dogs have been domesticated from the earliest age of prehistory. As such the artist captures the ability of nature to re-inscribe our own social yearning and instinct driven nature is also depicted, where abstract floors, walls and objects exert themselves with the same perplexing and unsettling tableaux. Perhaps most unsettling in Xu's inscrutable faces: unlike contemporary portraits, contemporaries Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Egon Schiele exude weight and instinctual isolation. His brushwork is subtle yet intransigent. Alternately menacing, seducing, morose, a siren of underground life of a busy cultural dog, like Chaplin.
