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 after the next to the first World War. His first mature paintings, which began to appear toward the extremity of the 1960s, are fields of luminous color, many times divided vertically into three equal sections. allowing most of these canvases are small to medium in size, their calmly expansive energy gives them an immense scale.

Haunted by dint of the work of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko Jansons's early paintings stake a claim upon the wide-open spaces of the American sublime. Evidence of the brush is nearly invisible, do not include at the edges of the canvas and along internal borderlines. Jansons's flat stretches of paint--especially his red and oranges--are powerful, however it is in these peripheries of his early images that his futurity lay.

As the seasons went by dint of the traces of his paint handling became more and more evident. through 1980, he was filling a great deal of of the canvas with vigorously worked fogs of high-keyed color. Though the underlying field persists, it is visible single in patches. The suggestion is of skyscapes and, as Jansons's imagery evolv hints of identifiable make submissive matter became more insistent. Ancient Road (1988) for example, gazes like a tangle of limbs, granting Jansons sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish human limbs from the arboreal kind. Nonetheless, he always thinking of his paintings as abstract, and that is in what way viewers saw them at the time. Critical commentary focused upon the play of form and upon the brushwork, which--as it grew more assertive--endowed his forms with remarkable complexity. In his late paintings, Jansons's touch is at one time scratchy and lush, as increasingly dark pigments, laid upon with painterly muscularity, fill the surface with shadowy agitation. notwithstanding delicacy is not defeated, and this ambiguity in Jansons's paint handling--is it cragged or is it refined?--carries above to images that can be read as sheer fabric or as fields of looping, intricately intertwined shapes.

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

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