​LANDSCAPE SERIES


​1996 - 2024​

By Dieter Ronte
​(Former director and Art Historian at Kunst Museum Bonn, Germany), 2018

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 Janses 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.

Abstract Expressionism was neither a style nor the result of a manifesto; it was rather the consensus of modern artistic approach in America after 1945, characterized by the fact that painting had abandoned representation in favor of a purely abstract picture making, as seen for example in the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and many others. Their ai was to created works of art, without imagery and without any influence from the outside world, dealt both with the painting as painting and with the momentary emotional or intellectual 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:

for example, a pig, an automobile tire, a toadstool, a few isolated figures, the artist himself, and the American flag, supplemented by the formal placement of numbers or letters, The alphabet of objects is the continuation of abstraction, and at the same time heightening and unleashing of abstraction.  The automobile tire , which can also be replaced by a life preserver, refers to trash, disposal, safety, speed, travels, dangers, technology-without any need for the artist to worry about rolling resistance of efficiency-risk, blowouts, transpiration, provisions, and many other aspects of everyday life, At the same time it is a reference to a famous 1961 installation by Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) in the back courtyard of a New York gallery, titled Yard or to a famous combine painting by Robert Rauschenberg (1927-2006) in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Monogram (1955-59), in which a goat stands in an automobile tire on a painted wood base. The tire becomes a metaphor for the for the life Jansen so critically questions in his invented post-apocalyptic scenes.

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 realty, n turn becomes abstract.