Andrew Jansons at Wooster Art Space - New York - art exhibition - Biography

Wooster Art Space was inaugurated with a series of three exhibitions tracing the career of the painter Andrew Jansons, who died in 1989. Born in Latvia in 1942, Jansons immigrated to the U.S. after the Second World War. His first mature paintings, which began to appear toward the end of the 1960s, are fields of luminous color, often divided vertically into three equal sections. Though most of these canvases are small to medium in size, their serenely expansive energy gives them an immense scale.

Haunted by the work of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Jansons's early paintings stake a claim on the wide-open spaces of the American sublime. Evidence of the brush is nearly invisible, except at the edges of the canvas and along internal borderlines. Jansons's flat stretches of paint--especially his reds and oranges--are powerful, yet it is in these peripheries of his early images that his future lay.

As the seasons went by, the traces of his paint handling became more and more evident. By 1980, he was filling much of the canvas with vigorously worked clouds of high-keyed color. Though the underlying field persists, it is visible only in patches. The suggestion is of skyscapes and, as Jansons's imagery evolved, hints of identifiable subject matter became more insistent. Ancient Road (1988), for example, looks like a tangle of limbs, though Jansons sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish human limbs from the arboreal kind. Nonetheless, he always thought of his paintings as abstract, and that is how viewers saw them at the time. Critical commentary focused on the play of form and on the brushwork, which--as it grew more assertive--endowed his forms with remarkable complexity. In his late paintings, Jansons's touch is at once scratchy and lush, as increasingly dark pigments, laid on with painterly muscularity, fill the surface with shadowy agitation. Yet delicacy is not defeated, and this ambiguity in Jansons's paint handling--is it rough or is it refined?--carries over to images that can be read as sheer texture or as fields of looping, intricately intertwined shapes.

The figurative implications in Jansons's paintings of the 1980s did not go unseen, yet the critics of that era tended to treat them as incidental. However, the past decade's flood of figuration--not to mention narrative--in all mediums has refocused our vision. From the vantage of the present, it looks as if Jansons did not draw a firm line between the figurative and the nonfigurative. Of course, nothing prevents us from seeing the late work as pure abstraction--nothing except doubts about purity. Jansons is one of those artists who remind us forcibly that art is by its nature manifold. Abstract as his paintings may be, the dense, often monumental, swirls of their forms tell stories not so much of people as of presences grappling with a grand and sometimes threatening landscape.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group