Marcus Antonius Jansen

By Kriss Perras, Malibu Arts Review

Influenced early in life by the emerging graffiti art movement in his neighborhood of Bronx, New York and later by the old German expressionist work from the early 20th century as well as European culture, painter Marcus Antonius Jansen’s work has received well-deserved international acclaim. The decayed structures and human forms are exemplified in the emotional strife of his urbanscapes of the poor.

Jansen’s distortion and exaggeration through use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space is jarring, violent and dynamic. Either a reemergence of certain medieval art forms or of Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement, Jansen’s work is a new angle on an ancient art and is reminiscent of the movement between 1901 and 1906 where several comprehensive exhibitions were held in Paris.

One of the first avant-garde developments in European art, these exhibitions made for the first time the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne universally accessible. The effect was one of liberation. Painters of that time period experimented with the radical new styles. Fauvism was the first movement of this modern period in which color ruled supreme, much like Jansen’s works.

“Many painters remove their ‘imperfections’ in their work, I use them to teach us what we do not know or see. It is through those imperfections that we learn,” Jansen said. “Expressionism is the art of the emotive, the art of tension provoked by consciousness of the forces which surround mankind. The inevitability of War, the rise of industrialization, the power of capitalism – poverty, all these things weighed on people’s minds at the beginning of the century when Expressionism originated.”

In his foreword to Modern Urban-Expressionism: The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen, noted museum director Jerome Allan Donson writes, ”...I told [Jansen] that I believed he was the originator of a new movement which I called ‘Urban Expressionism’ and that I believed there would be many followers in this new style. But there will be only one Marcus Jansen.”

Indeed Jansen’s works absolutely use color as an emotional force. Jansen’s painterly Fauvian freedom and expressive use of color gives vivid proof of his intelligent study of and influence from Van Gogh’s art.

Jansen seems to directly apply the paint in aggressive strokes creating an explosion of modern expressionistic angst. Revealing a primitive reality in his Fauve influence, Jansen seems to share a vibrant power of an unselfconscious application of color – a blend of the patterning and shape of elements.

A supreme sense of Synthetic Cubism – one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in art and a major influence on Western art – is present in these works. Radically fragmented objects; decorative shapes, stenciling, collage; flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane; not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; influences from the Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque who each splintered the visual world sensuously and beautifully; breaking down subjects into a number of facets; showing several different aspects of one object simultaneously; giving the appearance of using pieces of cut-up newspaper.

The entire frame adds up to a sense of a past movement that is reemerging with artists the likes of Henry Eric Hernández yet holds fast to a uniqueness all Jansen’s own.
Jansen is a cross between “hey, I am constitutionally guaranteed I can do this kill” and “my heart tells me I am not suppose to do this stuff.” Expressionism to the degree of Freud – but Freud is in a lot of art at present. There is a shift towards Freud in exhibitions right now. Artists draw on the American subconscious guilt of daily killing that happens for profit. There is a black wall but it is overshadowed by red – a foreshadow of what the soldier will happen after the so called peace wall is erected.