Primal paintings

There is something very visceral about seeing Sean Lean’s paintings for the first time: the incredibly detailed depictions of animals, the larger-than-life scale, the deep colours and the dense textures, all melding together to create a familiarity that goes beyond what we see on the canvas.
But that isn’t really surprising, since Lean’s inspiration is something we are all intimately familiar with: flesh. So his debut solo exhibition “Flesh: Blacks & Whites”, at the Wei-Ling Contemporary gallery in Kuala Lumpur, is both literally and metaphorically about flesh, from how it looks to how it makes us feel.
“I’ve always been fascinated by human flesh, inspired to paint it,” says the 32-year-old. “And I wanted to satisfy that urge further. The most literal way to do that was to focus on the flesh we consume. That’s why I started painting animals.”
Lean has previously shown his work in various group exhibitions here and, most recently, at 18@8 Kil-Sin in Singapore, an annual exhibition organised by the Wei-Ling gallery. He counts among his influences Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and Ann Gale, admitting that he has a strong preference for the figurative style.
“I’m not too interested in painting abstracts because I see abstraction within my figurative paintings – I feel this reflects life, where I also see abstraction within the real,” he explains.
He compares his compulsion to paint flesh with the primal urge to consume meat. “I can’t quite explain why I feel the urge to paint flesh. It’s almost primal – that craving or urge you get to bite into a piece of meat. It’s as basic a compulsion as that.”
In some of the paintings the flesh is powerful and confronting, like the almost three-dimensional scales of the reptile in “Black Dragon: Black Lizard” and the tough, interlocking muscles and sinews on the dog in “Black American Bulldog: Red, Black & Blue”. In others, colours and textures interplay to create a softness and vulnerability, such as in the infant-like skin in “White Piglet: When I Grow Up, I Want To Be An Astronaut”, and the lush yet delicate feathers in “White Peacock: A Fowl and Some Feathers”.
A common aspect is Lean’s tendency to break up the portraits by erasing bits of the animals, thereby both drawing the eye and creating a sense of discomfort. “I wanted to create visual tension,” he says. “If you look at the portraits, they all touch the sides of the frame and are pretty big in scale, because I wanted to create a larger-than-life impression. But at the same time the missing bits give the idea of fading away.”
Some of the more common themes are vanity and drive. These are apparent in “White Bull: We Both Know You Want Me”, the first painting in this collection.
“I find a very muscular bull to represent almost pure vanity – a show bull. It doesn’t plough fields and it isn’t used for meat, so it’s bred solely as a physical specimen.”
The specific animals he selected to paint have their own significance. The paintings allow him introspection, with the different animals representing a particular facet of the artist.
“Why I choose an particular animal depends on what I want to say. In some I had a view I wanted to communicate, while in others I chose something iconic to me and the deeper meanings behind it only came to me retroactively. I always feel a connection with what I’m working on, but what that is sometimes only becomes clear later.”

SKINNED ALIVE
“Flesh: Blacks & Whites” by Sean Lean is on show until June 20 at Wei-Ling Contemporary in Kuala Lumpur’s Gardens Mall. It’s open from 10am to 9pm daily.