Nothing is fixed in the Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssen's work. Everything is shine, fog, flow. Everything is boundless and unclear.
It's about how we look. About the most basic of art: about illusion and reality. And about the possibility of transformation.
Ann Veronica Janssens works in the borderland between art and science. But completely disrespectful, as if her "research" was being played out in her kitchen. She is experimenting with small means, the smallest and easiest imaginable. With light, air and liquids. The result is often quite beautiful. Small puffs of fog that obscure all contours, though which become fluid, clouds that dissolve boundaries.
She throws glitter on the floor - and it becomes a sculpture or a floor painting that the visitor enters. Maybe also an indication of the American action painter Jackson Pollock's way of painting.
She sets up a series of simple glass panels on the walls whose color magically change as the viewer passes. And she makes a site-specific installation for Louisiana where the horizon towards Sweden is undermined by another horizon, a wave movement that causes it to waver. All done with a little liquid oil.
Janssens has previously been outside the institutions, and her art preserves yet another openness that makes us see the outside world in new ways and put all the obvious at stake.
I like the feeling of magic, the fragility and the lack of self-glorification . The artist initiates small processes that we visitors participate in.
If we just open our eyes and ears and dare to play, the world can be fabulous. At least one kind.