Esther Janssen was born in Maastricht in 1976. As a child, she was
horse-crazy, but merely as a flight of fancy: she had only seen horses in the
pages of books. Her first riding lesson brought this to an abrupt end, the
experience was not the fairytale she had expected; the dream was no more.
Madonna proved a similar let down once Janssen found out that she is not
really blonde. Less innocent disillusionments were to follow: the notion of
free will; faith in the redeemability and significance of man; belief in
progress.
In essence, Janssen harks back to these sobering moments. Her work is an
attempt to create an illusion or defuse a situation. Her computer is just like
our world: apparently it leaves no room for imperfection or unpredictability.
In the program 'Photoshop', Janssen has discovered a method of 'portrayal'.
But portrayal is a quite different process with tools designed for photo
processing. New possibilities of depiction emerge. Photoshop reveals all the
colors which really make up a photograph. Grass, commonly perceived as green,
turns out to consist of ochers and grayish hues. Esther Janssen exploits and
highlights these hidden colors. They actually serve as her starting point. Her
painting then develops in layers, emerging from expanses of crude color. She
uses 'gradient' (the color intensity function) to fill areas from pale to
dark, lending a hint of depth. Often, she works on more than fifty layers at a
time. All these remain accessible, so that she can keep looking for the right
colors, transparency and balance of detail. This is actually one of the
fundamental differences from 'real' painting, in which each successive layer
seals off the previous one.
Esther Janssen's subjects are houses, playgrounds and landscaped nature, all
seemingly safe, controllable and unchanging – at first sight. She introduces
distortions, combines, exaggerates and dislocates. Out of this come
archetypes, symbols. The colors, the proportions, the light and the absence of
people whittle away at the illusion of a world which may seem, at first sight,
to be ideal.
Esther Janssen attended Eindhoven Design Academy. Her work appears in the
collections of the Dutch Foreign Ministry and the Fine Arts Centers in
Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
Source text by Cokkie Snoei
