"My first «constructions», made during the mid-80s, were spatial extensions of existing architecture. These graftings at once formed and gave onto what I call «super spaces» : the spaces surrounding a given space, spaces without space, places for the capture of light, cement and glass cases, spaces conceived as springboards towards the void. It is this void that I try to set in motion, conferring upon it a kind of temporality. I always experiment with the possibilities of rendering fluid the perception of matter or architecture which I see as some kind of obstacle to movement and sculpture. My use of light to infiltrate matter and architecture is undertaken with a view to provoking a perceptual experience wherein this materiality is made unstable, its resistance dissolved. This movement is often provoked by the brain itself. My projects are often based on technical or scientific facts. The resulting plastic proposition is then akin to a laboratory revealing its discoveries.” - Ann Veronica Janssens
Read MoreFor more than twenty years, Ann Veronica Janssens's (b. 1956 in Folkestone, England) work has been widely recognized for its ability to challenge and experiment with the definition of perception. Through her motifs of abstraction, mirroring, and light, Janssens deliberately displaces and transforms specific materials to explore what she terms the ‘ungraspable’. Drawing on scientific research, Janssens aims to create situations that can resemble laboratory experiments as much as works of art by drawing abstraction from the real with ultra minimal action. Everything is surface with Janssens, but in a revelatory form of negation. Janssens’s work exhibits formal affinities with minimalism and the California Light and Space movements of the 1960s and 70s, yet eschews their penchant for monumentality in favor of the intimate, subjective experience of the individual. Whereas minimal art often reduced forms to achieve an often monumental fetishism of the material, the raw simplicity of Janssens’ proposals offers the possibility of naked experience. Ann Veronica Janssen’s oeuvre pioneers a new understanding of the political potential of abstract which does not passively yield its meaning to the viewer but creates it anew – an art perceived not only through the retina but experienced viscerally.
Text courtesy 1301PE.