Introduction

The 2010/2011 exhibition season opens with 2 white flashes every 10 seconds, by Ann Veronica Janssens and Aurélie Godard. Two artists of different generations with a shared interest in natural and/or extraordinary phenomena. And an exhibition including many brandnew pieces, some of them dating from a residency on the island of Ouessant. The works are mixed in together in a mind-blowing layout. The title itself is a reference to the Créac‘h lighthouse on Ouessant, whose syncopated rhythm changes your perception of space and time. Using coloured fogs, light pulses and reflective or diaphanous surfaces, Ann Veronica Janssens is less concerned with form than with playing on our sensory experience of reality. Simple, fragile and ephemeral, her works test out our perception, our memory and our inner representations. For Aurélie Godard, form is the outcome of negotiation between the deliberate and the accidental: driftwood recycled as domestic furniture, random but meticulously outlined splashes of paint, wrinkled balls of cast aluminium. The tension these forms set up urge the imagination to look beyond mere sensation. Hovering between equilibrium and a state of suspension, the works of these two artists interact subtly, turning the exhibition space into a laboratory for contemplative sensory experiments. 

„Light, in the oeuvre of Ann Veronica Janssens, is not an instrument or a state, but a subject, with colour (subdued, vivid, hypnotic), smoke (thick, tactile) and space (transparent, organised, rearranged) all contributing to her experiments. „Her means and forms are minimal and the effect very subtle. What gives her work its impact is this formal solution to sensory questionings – but a self-evident solution involving no violence or constraint. The spectacular and the monumental have no place in these pieces, whose authenticity lies in a structural simplicity allowing for a direct emotional relationship with the work and its space. The critic Hans Theys has spoken of the humility of Janssens‘ work: ‚Humility lies in the rightness of the seeing. Seeing neither too much nor too little. Striving to see things in their true place. Not interfering. Humility in art finds expression in necessary acts, economical in their means and suited to their environment. „Our senses pick it up before our reason does: the art of Ann Veronica Janssens is an art of subtlety.“ [Guillaume Mansart]