Wooster Art Space was inaugurated with a series of three exhibitions tracing the career of the painter Andrew Jansons.

Wooster Art Space was inaugurated with a series of three exhibitions tracing the career of the painter Andrew Jansons, who died in 1989 Born in Latvia in 1942 Jansons immigrated to the U after the next to the first World War. His first mature paintings, which began to appear toward the expiration of the 1960s, are fields of luminous color, frequently divided vertically into three equal sections. granting most of these canvases are small to medium in size, their coolly expansive energy gives them an immense scale.

Haunted by way of the work of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko Jansons's early paintings stake a claim forward the wide-open spaces of the American sublime. Evidence of the brush is nearly invisible, excepting at the edges of the canvas and along internal borderlines. Jansons's flat stretches of paint--especially his red and oranges--are powerful, even now it is in these peripheries of his early images that his yet to be lay.

As the seasons went at the traces of his paint handling became more and more evident. by the agency of 1980, he was filling often of the canvas with vigorously worked vast assemblages of high-keyed color. Though the underlying field persists, it is visible no other than in patches. The suggestion is of skyscapes and, as Jansons's imagery evolv hints of identifiable enslave matter became more insistent. Ancient Road (1988) for example, turn the thoughtss like a tangle of limbs, notwithstanding that Jansons sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish human limbs from the arboreal kind. Nonetheless, he always conception of his paintings as abstract, and that is for what reason viewers saw them at the time. Critical commentary focused onward the play of form and forward the brushwork, which--as it grew more assertive--endowed his forms with remarkable complexity. In his late paintings, Jansons's touch is at one time scratchy and lush, as increasingly dark pigments, laid in succession with painterly muscularity, fill the surface with shadowy agitation. in addition delicacy is not defeated, and this ambiguity in Jansons's paint handling--is it cragged or is it refined?--carries through to images that can be read as sheer web or as fields of looping, intricately intertwined shapes.

The figurative implications in Jansons's paintings of the 1980 did not fare unseen, yet the critics of that era note carefullyed to treat them as incidental. However, the past decade's freshet of figuration--not to mention narrative--in all mediums has refocused our vision. From the vantage of the at hand it looks as if Jansons did not draw a firm line between the figurative and the nonfigurative. Of course, nothing stops us from seeing the late work as unspotted abstraction--nothing except doubts about purity. Jansons is individual of those artists who remind us forcibly that art is on its nature manifold. Abstract as his paintings may be, the close often monumental, swirls of their forms relate stories not so much of family as of presences grappling with a grand and sometimes threatening landscape.

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