After studying art history in England, Ann Veronica Janssens attended the La Cambre National School of Visual Arts, in Brussels. Since the mid-1980s, she has been developing a body of work placed under the aegis of experimentation, at once visual and sensory, intended to destabilize our perception of space and make light no longer an instrument but an actual subject. Her early works, the “super spaces”, which are extensions of existing architecture, like the Villa Gillet in Lyon (1989), illustrate her desire to abolish the rift between inner and outer space, and make our perception of architecture more fluid, by way of the circulation of light, which the artist would be endlessly using in its different formal possibilities, through the use of transparent elements (glass) and reflecting elements (mirrors); this diffuse matter enabled her to confront light with colour, smoke and space. In the early 2000s, she inaugurated a series of works which would give rise to many variations: Blue, Red and Yellow and Light Games (2001) were presented as opaque environments, which spectators were invited to enter, thus finding themselves plunged in a colourful fog. There followed another series of fogs, such as Jamaican Color’s + 1 for Mlle Justine (2003) and Mukha d’Anvers (2007). From then on, the mixture of light, colours and fog gave rise to new works with an unstable material quality, including Bluette (2006), a blue star made of smoke and light spots. Through the use of light, she has experimented with various phenomena: dazzlements (Présentation d’un corps rond 2, 2001), luminous bombardments, retinal persistence, vertigo, saturation, speed, flashing lights; Donut (2003), a luminous trombinoscope, represents an excellent example of this. However, Janssens’s works are not attached to any form of monumentality; on the contrary, the means and forms are minimal, at the service of a poetic œuvre, playing on the boundary between the visible and the invisible.
Ludovic DELALANDE
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
