Boukje Janssen
Sara Reisman
Netherlands-based artist Boukje Janssen recently exhibited her series of mostly small paintings at LMAKprojects in Williamsburg, where I first saw the work and met with the artist last November. This body of work, entitled "Memories, Dreams and Nightmares" for the purpose of exhibition, is described by the artist in this way: "As a basis for this series I used photos from newspapers, depicting different kinds of disasters, such as of individuals, places or nations, with which the media is constantly overloading its consumers." These paintings make reference to a number of painters and conceptual artists from the 1970s to the present. Most notably, Janssen’s Flee (2005) shares affinities–of content and aesthetics–with Martha Rosler’s newspaper collages of the 1970s. Through a painterly treatment of her subjects, Janssen depersonalizes media representation of war-torn locales, figures on the horizon and silhouettes of the human form in ambiguous positions that are open enough to be read, for example, as a figure kneeling in prayer or cowering in fear.
Janssen’s deft use of what is, for the most part, a limited palette in varying degrees of gray, white and black, highlights the muddiness of newsprint and how in many instances the gaze is more informed by its own perceptual and cognitive disposition than what is actually on the page or in the painting. In Queue, anonymous figures form a line for an undisclosed outcome. Together their bodies form a horizon line mirrored by their collective distorted and ominous shadow, again calling into question the perceptual and ethical standpoint of the subject of news media as well as that of the media consumer. Janssen’s use of shadow, like a memory fading into the recesses of our minds, is apt when considering the deluge of imagery that her work addresses. The shadow also speaks to the subtle but meaningful effects of political struggle not immediately apparent in day-to-day life in many places where the news is received.
Janssen discusses the subjects of these paintings in terms of repetition and sheer number. "The amount of images, which carry an extremely heavy emotional weight in the media is so inconceivable–it fades away in the collective subconscious, which inevitably becomes more and more resistant to horrors." To counter the way this information is processed, she depersonalizes newspaper photographs of anonymous figures–individually, in small groups, and en masse. Through a process of isolation and further depersonalization of already impersonal and displaced figures, Janssen’s paintings urge recognition and reconsideration of the conditions of her subjects.
