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stephen wright
linear process
2001

Linear Process

Grid-ridden

We’re trapped. Though we don’t always care to acknowledge the fact. Trapped in an all-encompassing and multilayered grid, as infinitely broad as it is long; in a matrix that is Existence itself. It is an existential entrapment, from which the fleeting urgencies of day-to-day life, and the vapid jingoism of functional reason are wont to distract – but never extract – us. “Like it or not, you must be caught” as the nursery rhyme says, with faintly morbid overtones. Always already caught, in fact, in a gridwork that is our permanent horizon line, that recedes as we advance and encroaches when we pull back. Such is the underlying structure of sentiment of Arjan Janssen’s art, the profoundly human dimension of his purely formal visual idiom, the existential predicament he seeks to render intelligible in his paintings and drawings.
Intensely melancholic and saturnine, his work uses sparing visual means to pry this structure of feeling back to the quick. If his art has any extrinsic purpose, it is doubtless to reawaken us to our human predicament, challenge the sort of distracted self-deception that goes with repressing the reality of death. Psychoanalysts have a nice term for this form of denial – of not perceiving what is visibly there: they call it “negative hallucination”. It is of the common, non-pathological though metaphysical form of this phenomenon that Janssen hopes to cure us. The lack of seriousness and depth that he so deplores in contemporary existence leads him to a mode of painting having no truck with “realism”, which, far from showing the world merely as it is, seeks to provide an analytical grid of feeling behind appearances. His work, in other words, does not stem from a visual perception; rather, it conditions perception. Consequently, though the obsessively symmetrical and layered gridworks give Janssen’s work its particular form, they have no distinct meaning or objective content. Yet a certain affinity of mood likens them to the concept that philosopher Karl