Introduction

For her third exhibition at Esther Schipper, Ann Veronica Janssens has transformed the gallery into a darkened laboratory. Her installations are test scenarios that can be experienced temporarily, leading the viewer’s visual perception into a field of possible sculptures. In Experiences and Sketches—eleven models from the past ten years—Janssens traces her own artistic production in terms of experience with the material. In this way, she documents her experiments and preliminary studies in approaches to space and light. Here, the models and exhibition fragments are brought together in a laboratory of her oeuvre, documenting Janssens work as a field of potential experiences. Some works, in larger form, have already been part of other shows and projects.

For Rouge 106 – Bleu 132, Janssens positions blue and red light at the upper edge of a semi-transparent, walk-in box. The light flickers at a rapid 7.5 Hertz, a frequency that corresponds with human brain activity, causing the primary colours to create a glaring white that is unstable and barely visible to the human eye. Human sensory apparatus turns the technical construction into a natural spectacle. This piece was realized on a large scale in 2003 at the Musée d’Orsay. High-frequency light and direct engagement of individual perceptive faculties as part of the work is a central moment in Janssens’ works. In the projection Slow Light, this is reversed. Here, the artist works with decelerated illumination of a light bulb and a neon tube, making visible the near-imperceptible light that is the precondition of visual experience. In Untitled, a glass cube is filled with a layer of distilled water and a layer of paraffin oil. Here, light becomes perceptible as a material in the sculptural arrangement because the different density of the two liquids refracts and separates it. Test E-LITE (digiflex) shows a test strip for fluorescent light on a workbench. In 2002, SCRUB COLOUR II was projected onto a large indoor surface in cooperation with the gallery in Berlin. Here too, the physical and chemical phenomenon is translated into a series of aesthetic experiences, this time via a sequence of different coloured fields, projected at various intervals and sizes.

Another table bears a neon tube and some electrical equipment, a test model for an artistic intervention in the lighting system at the National Theatre in Brussels (Test pour le Théâtre National). Every sixty seconds, the light flickers on briefly and almost imperceptibly.

Espace Infini deals with the way we experience space and our surroundings. The rounded corners within the model blur the borders of the defined space, denying human cognitive perception its usual spatial frame of reference. This preliminary study, too, served to realize the larger-scale version in Brussels.