Berlin-based Dutch artist Gerard Janssen uses pen and ink to give character to objects to express human emotions. Houses and trees often appear in his drawings, sometimes looking sad or brooding. They have human emotions. Gerard Janssen says: “In my art I give objects their own history and behavior, so that a different order and new meanings emerge. In this way I want to increase our awareness of what is around us.”

Gerard Janssen was born in Smallingerland in the Netherlands in 1967. Today he lives in Berlin. He studied at the Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, among other places. When drawing, the artist sometimes feels the same joy as when playing as a child, when he built his own world with its own rules and its own stories. Thus his drawings seem like excerpts from longer narratives. The viewer suspects that something happened before and something might happen after.

Galerie Blaue Stunde, Berlin

 

In his drawings, Gerard Janssen works with the strangeness of the familiar, i.e. with an irritation based on the relationship between the identities of objects that can be named and the pictorial emptiness that results from the spatial permeability of their linearly outlined forms. This permeability creates a placelessness of feeling in which the drawings become a projection space for sensations that spring from personal memory of and connection with the objects depicted. The emptiness of the everyday, general meaning of these pictorial signs is shared outwardly as an entry zone for shifting individual perspectives. 

The interaction of space, object and sign is the ‘blind spot’ of everyday life, its enigma. It happens, and it is brought about by actions whose consequences cannot be grasped or considered. We live according to the principle of trial and error, of repetition and trust. In the process, divergent perspectives of action can intertwine to form structures that then develop a life of their own.

Wolfgang Siano, Berlin