Ann Veronica Janssens is best known for her use of ephemeral materials such as colours, artificial fog, water, and light. Objects themselves are not very prevalent in her work, but properties of matter (gloss, lightness, transparency, fluidity) and physical phenomena (reflection, refraction, perspective, balance, waves) are rigorously investigated for their ability to destabilize the very concept of materiality.

The implementation of those elements lends itself to the excavation of the balance between the defined and the undefined. Her work evolves around cognition, reflexes, meanings, and the human mind, and serves to explore perception by unbalancing both perceptive and sensory experiences.

By using different means of presentation – installations, projections, immersive environments, mist rooms, urban interventions, sculptures – Janssens invites the viewer to cross into a new sensory space, a space that finds itself on the borderline of dizziness and bedazzlement. A loss of orientation and control becomes linked to questions of perceptual psychology.

Her installations are a poetic laboratory where weight and weightlessness, movement and gravity mix with space and time, opening again and again onto the wonder of being in the world.

She tries less to grasp the impalpable and chooses to experiment with its multiple forms and apparitions instead. Janssens work is based on one’s sensorial experience, the encounter of the body and the space. She uses light, colour and sound to create experiences that heighten a viewer’s perception and awareness of space and movement. The visitor – whom Janssens disorientates by the modification and destruction of the known space – is an integral part of her installations. She engages all senses to render the immaterial visible and tangible.

The Belgian artist represents a post-minimalist generation of artists who employ various media of expression to process their perceptions of the world. Working primarily with light, she has created an interwoven oeuvre of installations comprising elements such as fog, sound and moving images, as well as projections, urban interventions and lyrical sculptural pieces.

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Ann Veronica Jannssens // Airs // Kamel Mennour Gallery // Paris, France // Exhibition on view through 22 May 2021

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