Through minimal forms and gestures that have an anti-monumental quality, she is actually able to change the public’s perception of space. “She” is Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, UK, 1956; lives and works in Brussels), an artist that since late 1970s has developed her research around light and its relationship to what surrounds it, often creating site- specific works. Frequently associated with the work of “Light & Space” group (1960s: Robert Irwin and James Turrell among others) Janssens has built her own practice on overcoming the art object through its dematerialization and deconstruction. She has investigated the sensory and performative nature of space and architecture, creating works that are mutable and ephemeral. Now Pirelli HangarBicocca presents “Grand Bal”, a retrospective of her work (until 30 July 2023) curated by Roberta Tenconi. Emerging from her research, the artist’s interventions are set on the border between art and science, and investigate, as well as the aleatory connotations of natural phenomena, down to their minimum scale. So, “Grand Bal” is conceived as an extended choreography that situates environmental installations alongside more intimate works, tracing a visual, aural and tactile path that invites visitors to move between the tangible and between the incorporeal, surreal atmospheres and the socio-political and cultural signs of our present time.
Light, color, mirrors, air or artificial fog, are calling for the direct participation of viewers, inviting them to experience reality differently, to develop an awareness of their senses, of the architecture and spatial-temporal categories by which we define it, emphasizing its sociopolitical and cultural aspects. Often based on experiments carried out in collaboration with scientists, the artist’s works become labs for testing the boundaries between properties and physical-material elements that are regarded as opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, emptiness and presence, the tangible and the incorporeal. Presenting the most comprehensive selection of her works to date, the exhibition includes both historical projects and new productions. The artist has come up with an unprecedented intervention, waves (2023), in which she transforms some of the exit doors into openings: by replacing the doors with a porous, transparent PVC net, she allows natural light, as well as sounds, air and other external elements, to penetrate into the exhibition space. The title “Grand Bal” (grand ball in French) evokes precisely this performative dimension, the dynamic relationship that is established between works, architecture and the human body as in a dance.
This connection is already evident in the first installation that opens the exhibition, Drops (1999/2023), presented at the entrance to the Navate. Twelve round mirrors, arranged on the floor of the Piazza, reflect drop-like fragments and details of the building’s architectural structure, troubling the visitor’s perception of the site and offering new visual perspectives on the surroundings. This work is a new version of Danaé (1999), created in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, in which mirrors on the ground interacted with, and reflected, the image of Tintoretto’s (1518-1594) ceiling frescoes. Many of the artist’s works question the meaning of architecture, redefining the features of buildings and public spaces. L’espace infini (1999), a hollow rectangular structure that has no corners or edges, confronts visitors with a completely white environment, in which an optical effect prevents the eye from discerning dimensions and borders, causing a sense of vertigo and infinity. In Bitter, Salty, Acid and Sweet (2019), Janssens again investigates the abstract qualities of color, using two large beams of artificial light, which move through the space out of sync, without ever being able to overlap, in an illusory, immaterial pursuit that creates a sense of tension. Untitled (Prism) (2013), in its apparent simplicity, is formed by a small crystal prism placed on a sheet of glass captures light, whose colored reflections are manifested within the form. The artist says about the work, “My main material is light. I use it in all shapes, liquid, solid, gaseous… as a reflection… It’s a bit like a kind of evidence of a radiation that occurs, a radiation that…allows me to show the manifestations of reality in a different way […] I work a lot by subtraction. There are quite simple shapes, simple propositions… it’s a kind of I remove, I remove, I decrease, I try to go towards the minimum”.
