PEINTURES INTERIEURS - DJOS JANSSENS - CURATED BY BERNARD MARCELIS
02/06/2022 - 14/07/2022
This title of interior paintings and its multiple meanings are not unrelated to one of Djos Janssens' most striking pictorial integrations, the one he created for the cafeteria of the Uhoda company offices in Liège. Entitled Voyages, it extends over the entire wall of the premises, giving it a new identity. One could almost speak of a 'set' in front of which scenes from everyday life are played out in an abstracted context. On this warm ochre yellow support, mirrors, photographs and aphorisms take their place, multiplying the interpretations that can be associated with this place. It has gone from being an ordinary place to an artistic integration for the comfort of the staff, while at the same time constituting a work of art in its own right, which can be assimilated to a pictorial environment.
The interior paintings can be seen as a continuation of this work, but in two dimensions. We are no longer talking about a cafeteria here, but alternately about an entrance hall, a stairwell, lift doors, a lounge, a museum room, which would function in much the same way. At the outset, with a few exceptions, they are all banal views of interiors whose primary purpose is self-evident and does not require any particular attention, often without any specific cachet, especially for those that are only places of passage. Thanks to his nuanced pictorial intervention, Djos Janssens transforms them into interior landscapes that he paradoxically highlights under a diffuse veil that gives them an atmosphere that is as unsuspected as it is intriguing, rather like certain paintings by the painter Jacques Monory. This pictorial treatment helps to erase the vernacular details of the original images, transforming them into a truly personal universe. into a truly personal universe, which is what one would expect from an artist.
Djos Janssens could leave it at that, but he sometimes distills a few of his secret aphorisms around the edges of his canvases in an almost imperceptible way. In this way, he wants to share with the attentive viewer a certain point of view on the world, often with humour or irony, in order to avoid any univocal interpretation and not to be trapped by the images, however attractive they may be. images, however seductive they may be. As Caroline Lamarche so aptly puts it, Djos Janssens' work consists of 'a thought, through the image, of the attention to be paid to others'.
In connection with the above, this Brussels exhibition is constituted as a whole that which begins with the windows seen from the street. Janssens adapts an earlier work to the façade, The Curtain, reconfigured for the occasion, as a way of introducing the visitor to his work and the visual and mental experiences it induces.
Bernard Marcelis
Janssens Djos
