Ann Veronica Janssens, and the light shines

Discreet and reserved, Ann Veronica Janssens, 66, does not appreciate the exercise of the interview to which her rich topicality obliges her. This summer, in fact, the Belgian artist is on all fronts. At the Panthéon in Paris, she placed a large circular mirror on the ground under Foucault’s pendulum to reflect the dilated volumes of this solemn building designed by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot. In Avignon, it occupies the first floor pierced with twenty-six windows of the Lambert Collection, where the perception of visitors varies according to the path of the sun.

Echoing and almost a contrario, at the CAB Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Ann Veronica Janssens makes artificial light vibrate with plays of shadows and luminous halos. “Don’t forget the Saint-Vincent chapel! », she recommends, directing us to a detour via Grignan, in the Drôme, where, since 2013, its stained glass windows in glass paste monolith compose a score of light green, bright blue and orange, magnifying the mystical simplicity of this church romance.

The out of whack senses

Gaseous or radiant, diffracted and iridescent, light is its material. Rooms coated in opalescent fog – her signature since 1997 –, chromatic baths in which bodies soak to the marrow, stroboscopic effects… Everywhere, Ann Veronica Janssens disturbs our senses. Each time, the eye surrenders, escapes, then pulls itself together, an experience at the edge of the visible that causes slight shivers and dizziness.

The mirage is sometimes such that the same work made of a block of optical polished glass is perceived differently, depending on whether it absorbs the colors in artificial lighting at the CAB or whether it radiates in the harsher light of the sun outside. exhibition of the Lambert Collection. Sometimes the trouble comes down to just a few things: a mixture of oil and water poured into an aquarium with a colored background, a kick in turquoise flakes that shimmer on the ground like stardust. Simple gestures that come from a formidable precision mechanism.

Coming from a family of architects, Ann Veronica Janssens has ” naturally “ started studying to become one in turn. “A big misunderstanding” she understood. Drawing for hours behind a desk, obeying functional specifications, very little for her. “What interested me were the volumes, the movement of bodies in space, life, but not the constraints”, says the graduate of the school of visual arts of La Cambre, in Brussels. Rather than creating beams and racks, she prefers to imagine labyrinths where the walls vanish to better free us from the tangible.

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