Andrew Jansons

Painting of the Eighties

Essay by Carter Ratcliff

        For all its subtlety, the light in Andrew Jansons' recent paintings is dramatic, and sometimes the drama seems harsh. White and high-pitched grays flicker along jagged edges.  Craggy forms loom out of the darkness. One thinks of lightning piercing the night to reveal a fierce landscape, or of sunlight breaching the interior of an immense cave.  I am describing Jansons' abstract canvases as if they were representational, a not entirely inappropriate procedure.  In works of recent years, his play of color, tone, and texture alludes frankly to space, to objects, and to the human figure. He was bringing his art to the verge of depiction.  Yet he had no intention of crossing that border.

       Jansons' appreciation of figurative work from earlier painters was deep.  Nonetheless,  he believed that, in the present, painting is the effort to make an object, an image, that stands on its own through the elaboration of principles specific to itself.  Thus a painting is by nature abstract, an emblem of the self-reliant individual who finds the sources of his integrity within himself.   In their self-confidence, the works in this exhibition permit, even encourage, us to give our interpretive powers full rein. Often, suggestions of lithe columnar forms emerge from Jansons' fields of color.  Sometimes these forms seem to stride, like legs, or to gesture in the manner of arms.  One sees fragments of architecture and landscape.  Titles like His Right Hand, Shelter, and Waiting at the Edge provide a warrant for the feeling that Jansons' populated these paintings with dramatis personae and provided them with a stage.

       Still, his allusions never overwhelm his materials.  Always, his paint asserts itself as the primary force in his art, a tangible presence so powerfully animated that it can afford to be generous.  Jansons felt free to let his jabbing, restless brushwork make strong allusions to people and things because he was confident that the painterly texture, the very weave of his colors, would reassert itself.  Abstraction could risk subordination to subject matter because it had the strength to persist on its own terms, self-sufficient, its integrity reinforced by grappling with its opposite.

       In representational painting, light flows over surfaces.   It illuminates from the outside.  In Jansons' paintings, surface is light, the agitated outer plane of shape that is luminous throughout.  Dark zones in these paintings are not shadows, but shifts in luminosity.   Somber tones signify, not light absent, but light modified. 

       See this and one understands that Jansons' acknowledged no external authority, only his will to make an image. Thus he asserted the power of form to generate its own light.  Having done that, Jansons was free to engage representation's basic device - chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark that models volume by depicting the flow of light from an exterior source.  He could arrange lights and darks to conjure up human shapes from the turbulence of the field.

       Yet a careful look at these effects flattens them to the canvas.  Drawing near,  the eye notes in dense grays a glow that simply doesn't appear when we read Jansons' dark passages as representations of shadows.  At this point, one sees again the abstractness of his abstractions.  For Jansons, abstraction was not as a narrow possibility but a wide one, not a system of constraints but a liberation that could lead, almost,  to figurative imagery.  Yet he did not take that step.   He wanted to remain the sort of painter who, whatever the range of his allusions, offers paint as paint, sheer pigment charged with the intention that drives the painters brush.

       In paintings of two decades ago, Jansons generated luminosity from fields of bright red and orange.   Nothing interrupted these fields, save vertical flurries of color - internal borders that echo the canvas' edges.  Over the years,  the field grew more complex.  Bright colors shared the surface with darker ones.  Allusive forms appeared.  Soon Jansons had crowded the field with lush and insistent detail.  He wanted us to look through complexity to the abiding simplicity of the luminous field basic to the idea of abstract painting in America.

       Jansons was a New York painter.  It was in this city that he began to paint.  He always had his studio in Manhattan, and his paintings have the large-scale characteristic of New York art.  Their images push at the edges of the field,  no less vigorously in his small works on paper than in his large canvases.  Here and there, one sees local patches of quiet where the brushes patterns of thrust and counter-thrust appear to be resolved.  Yet the resolution is never final.  Always some mark is coiled, like a muscle, or a color answers the question put by  another with a force that its immediate situation cannot contain.  From the centers of calm in Jansons' image, flow energies that eventually reach the outer limits of the painting.  When they do, they never seem satisfied to stop, though of course they must.  The necessity is obvious - there are decisive edges to stretched canvases and sheets of paper.  Because these limits are so much the consequences of physical fact, they seem arbitrary.  Unlike images in the European tradition derived from the Renaissance - images that display what we call composition - Jansons'  images contain no principle of closure.  Like space, they could go on forever.  This potential infinitude gives his paintings their large scale.

       A notable point - and I think that history will eventually establish it as the chief point - of New York painting is its disinclination to accept the constrictions that held avant-garde painting in Europe to a modest scale.  In Cubism and even in the most ambitiously Utopian works of abstractionists like Mondrian, the formal architecture of the painted image reiterates the scale of the modern city.  Paintings made in the years after World War II by New Yorkers like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko are more expansive.  They reach beyond the already vast scale of their city to the openness of American space.  I don't mean that we should see their paintings as abstract renderings of the Great Plains.  Rather, they realized a new pictorial scale by finding images of the American sense of possibility in an unbounded present.

       There is something to be learned from the difficulties that Europeans often feel when confronted by the big, sprawling, allover paintings of the New York school.  They find none of the order, the hierarchy of forms, the limitations of scale - that give the Mondrian's art an intelligibility very like that of Piero's.Of course, some American art displays that sort of order.  The art that does not can be bewildering  for it conveys qualities of American life that, even now,  are difficult for any but Americans to understand.  

       Born in Latvia in 1942, Jansons came to this country when he was eight.  Growing up here, Jansons accepted the openness of America and, as his art shows, he intuited its nature.  He grasped it - if one can speak of grasping a quality of boundlessness - and made it the premise of his art.   Some passages in his recent canvases are tightly composed, yet there is no closure.  Alloverness wins, though not by defeating composition.  So capacious was his idea of abstraction that, as I've noted, it permitted something approaching representation to appear in his recent paintings. As Jansons practiced it, abstraction is the most generous state of the image, the one that acknowledges the widest range of pictorial possibilities.

       When Jansons showed his work for the first time in New York, the color-field painters like Morris Lewis and Jules Olitski were widely considered the direct descendants of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock.  There is much of this finicky charting of genealogies in the New York world.  The art of the first post-war generation is so ambiguous in so many ways that any descriptive control is welcomed.  Accompanying these genealogical calculations was the narrowly formalist analysis that tried to reduce the sprawl of the allover image to manageable proportions.  Though few critics were hard-line formalists, it was customary for many of them to confine their discussions of painting to matters of edge, picture plane, and tonal relationships.  A critical orthodoxy reigned, which Jansons did not accept.  Nor did it prompt him to complain.  He worked in the belief that if painting is free of dogma, like his, it is available to the unencumbered eye.  He also believed that encumbrances fall away.  They do, but not as quickly as we would wish.  Familiar talk of surface, edge, and tone produced too narrow an idea of what it is for art to be about art, and this idea is still with us, occupying the place of a larger idea that might help us see what is at stake in the strongest post-war American art.  I'm not suggesting that to see Jansons art properly, we must set aside the usual inventory of abstract painting's components.  Far from it.  What I am saying is that Jansons is among those New York painters who put so much pictorial pressure on surface and edge, that they make it impossible to see these formal elements as merely formal. 

       Color flickers over Jansons' canvases.   Or it advances in quick, dense bursts.   It swerves and lunges, always in response to its immediate situation.   Never does a red or a green give the impression of trying to escape its particular redness or greenness.  These colors exemplify themselves, not some generalized, formal option.  Thus we can't see Jansons' colors apart from their textures, and we can't note these textures without reading them as evidence about his gestures.  That is why I personify Jansons' colors, saying that they advance, that they lunge.  It is possible to describe them merely as colors, the attributes of pigments, but that obscures their energy and the sense that, in Jansons' paintings, colors trace the flow of the artist's intentions.  He treated the surface of the canvas as a reflection of his will.  To each stage of a work he seems to have responded as if to fresh knowledge about himself.  

       Like other painters in post-war New York who were skeptical about formalism's narrowest variants, Jansons devised a formalism of his own.  This was of course a matter of practice, not theory.  To define the flatness of the canvas was, for him, to show its fitness to respond to the gestures of his brush.   Charged with his painterly purposes, the surface might speed the gestures that reached for the edge of the canvas.  Or it might encourage brushwork to establish a region of order and calm far from the edge.  Any flatness of the surface less personal than this was of no interest to Jansons.

       His paintings of the early 70s were blazingly quiet.   Unsettling their serenity, he permitted the lines that had partitioned the fields to become forms in their own right - shapes with a degree of independence from backgrounds that, until now, were foregrounds and had known no intrusions.   These fields had, so to speak, known only themselves.  Over the seasons, as shapes grew more complex, jagged bursts of brushwork demanded more of the field for themselves.   From surfaces lacking all but the most attenuated shapes had evolved surfaces alive with flat, vigorously shaped abstractions.  Jansons had invented a pulsating, gesticulating kind of alloverness. 

        According to his working definition of the surface, it is a field responsive to his will, as evidenced by his gesture.  However vigorously, even violently, one flurry of brushwork challenges another, all cooperate in the unifying the painting's surface.  The oneness of the surface is of course a physical fact, but it is not merely that.  Nor is it just a claim made by theory, for Jansons established his definitions in practice.  Only by gathering those definitions of surface and edge, tone and hue, directly from his brushwork can one see how thoroughly each of his paintings is unified within the edges it persistently challenges.

       Jansons' works generate unity from self-reference.  Every form, each nuance of brushwork, is a response to - and a commentary on - other forms and nuances.  Managed in a certain way, this sort of alertness of itself can turn a painting inward.  It can detach a work from its maker, setting it free to serve as an exemplary instance of formal self-definition.   This doesn't happen to Jansons' paintings.  He didn't treat form as form, but as the product of his gesture.   So he didn't make art about art.  His paintings are about their own coming into being.  They have their meaning as emblems of the artist's presence.  Like others in the centrifugal New York tradition that scatters artists to the extremes of their individuality, Jansons turned self-referential form into gesture that reflects on itself.  In his intense ruminations on the question of how a painting ought to be, we can read Jansons' understanding of the way for the artist to be - restlessly inventive, incapable of complacency, and totally independent.

Carter Ratcliff

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