By Art Historian Dieter Ronte (Former director Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany).
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Marcus Jansen was discovered by one of the major connoisseurs of Abstract Expressionism in America. Jerome A. Donson, director of traveling exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, compared Jansens art to that of the socio-critical Ashcan School, and hailed him as the innovator of a modern expressionism (See Modern Urban Expressionism; The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen, 2006). 

Pointing to the Ashcan School, founded in New York in 1904 by painters from Philadelphia such as Maurice Prendergast, Donson highlighted the social criticism in Jansens work and with the term Expressionism he referred to the distinctive abstract components of his paintings and installations.
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Abstract Expressionism was neither a style nor the result of a manifesto; it was rather the consensus of a modern artistic approach in America after 1945, characterized by the fact that painting had abandoned representation in favor of purely abstract picture painting, as seen for example in works like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and many others. 



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Their aim was to create works of art that, without imagery and without any influences from the outside world, dealt both with the painting as painting and with the momentary emotional or intellectual state of the given painter.

​In Marcus Jansens “Urban expressionism” the canvas as painted abstraction is also the support for pictorial information from the external world. The canvas becomes the promulgator of urban social, surreal visions of the world. It takes up the reality of the artist's worlds: it formulates a critical artistic approach.

​​As his artistic idiom Jansen has created a personal pictorial alphabet that repeatedly appears in his various paintings or installations. The automobile tire, which can also be replaced by a life preserver, refers to trash, disposal, safety. Speed. Travel, dangers, technology- without any need for the artist to worry about rolling resistance of efficient-risk, blowouts, transportations, provisions and many other aspects of everyday life.
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In this way Jansen avoids the constraints of the precise representation of Hyperrealism or hyperrealism. He utilizes the actual presence of objects by integrating them into his work as Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, yet in the painting they elude logical explanation. Jansen insists on the freedom of being subjective, to breach the social expectation of a fixed cannon. The objects experience the freedom of subjectivity in the work of art so that abstraction breaks into realism and reality, in turn becomes abstract.