LANDSCAPES
1996 - 2025​

​IMPROVISATION AS CREATIVE PRINCIPLE

The powerful objective visions that Marcus Jansen creates while working on a canvas, and at the end of the painting process places before the viewer, almost seductively invite interpretations of their content. It is therefore tempting to analyze Jansen’s work solely on the basis of its objectively identifiable elements and to interpret it as pictorial commentary on present-day social and political realities. This type of analysis has been attempted in some writings on Jansen from previous publications. And in the present volume, Manfred Schneckenburger has most convincingly related the identifiable scenic events in Jansen’s works to certain political events and sociological phenomena of recent years and tied them to specific details from the painter’s biography. But since the motifs and allusions that lend themselves to interpretation in Jansen’s various works are extremely diverse — some of them virtually flung into the viewer’s face, others rejecting any comparison to actual objects — his painting cannot be adequately appreciated solely through identification and interpretation of the objects depicted. Indeed, I would maintain that the effects Jansen produces with his partial reification of originally abstract forms are merely a precisely calculated by-product of his creative activity, not something determined from the start.

And I would further assert that when Jansen begins working on a painting he has no specific goal in mind, no specific scene which he is required to do justice to. He does not know where his improvisatory handling of pigments and painting utensils will lead. At times the shapes with which he first spontaneously structures the surface invite him to gestures that are freely abstract, yet sophisticated from a painterly perspective; at other times he discovers in the painting thus begun structures that seem to demand to be interpreted objectively and turned into recognizable objects. In the following I will illustrate how, using purely painterly means and with free, quasi-abstract gestures, Marcus Jansen creates illusionistic effects that surpass in their expressiveness almost everything that naturalistic-minded painters are able to produce with their careful renderings of things.

The more actual objects and figures we feel we can recognize in Jansen’s paintings, the more exciting it is to discover that these spatial and figural illusions have been suggested by wholly unconventional, even incongruous means. And the more wildly the painter indulges in freely determined colors and forms, the more one marvels at the sometimes startlingly precise social and urban scenes he appears to create with almost ironic offhand ease. Jansen usually begins a work by freely laying out structures on the primed canvas. In the film Marcus Jansen – Examine & Report we see how he draws a broad, long-handled brush soaked with black pigment back and forth across the painting surface in a single zigzag gesture, producing a scaffolding of black beams. The film does not show us what he does next, but the many paintings illustrated in the present volume make abundantly clear how the painter reacts to this initial statement. As a rule Jansen’s first response to the quasi-draftsmanly basic structure produced by these initial powerful brushstrokes is a softer element, one produced with wholly painterly means.

After this, highly contrasting techniques counter each other. Among the utensils he employs are brushes, brooms, rollers, and palette knives. Sometimes pigments flow across the picture surface in watery, transparent streams; sometimes large dollops of paint remain as compact as if poured in enamel. Diffuse, cloud-like structures are produced with spray paint. And again and again, brash accidental splatters are mixed in with the blend of colors and forms, with their still undetermined content. It may then happen that the abstract structures Jansen has caused to collide in the painting remind him of actual places and events, of things he has experienced, of events that have upset him. And then a second design process begins in which the actual motifs that have come to him by association are suggestively worked into the picture fabric. Suddenly spaces can open up that seem to suggest a junk-filled backyard. Figures appear whose gestures evoke dark premonitions. And everyday objects, rendered in jarring detail, sail through abstract swaths of color. The disjuncture thus created  is further heightened by the addition of collaged photo elements with obvious messages, or by miniature three-dimensional objects glued onto the painting surface in significant spots, lifting the realism into a third dimension. But even where the suggested figures and added objects appear to invite interpretation and emotional reactions, it is painting that remains the master of the situation.

No matter how lively their behavior in the painting, the figures are drawn into the maelstrom of nonobjective painterly suggestions, into the greater abstract structure dominating the composition. And it is precisely this distinct, often merciless clash between affecting narrative features and an overpowering pictorial impact that makes these paintings so unique. The painter manages to combine the gestural and coloristic freedoms of abstract painting with the literal eloquence and craftsmanly precision of naturalistic depictions. Indeed, thanks to the contrapuntal juxtaposition of these two opposing artistic principles, the effects of both the abstract and the objective elements are considerably heightened.

- By Prof. Dr. Gottfried Knapp (Art Critic)