On display are twelve large-format canvases, created from 2013 to today, which exorcise the ghosts of insecurities on the international socio-political chessboard.
La Triennale di Milano hosts from 3 to 21 September 2016 DECADE, a solo show by the American artist Marcus Jansen (New York, 1968), considered one of the reference points for the new generation Neo-expressionist scene. The exhibition, curated by Brooke Lynn McGowan and Rossella Farinotti, is organized in collaboration with the Bianca Maria Rizzi & Matthias Ritter Gallery of Milan and the Associazione Show Eventi Arte of Rome, on the occasion of the events of the XXI Triennale di Milano.
The Milanese appointment with DECADE represents the starting point of a journey back in time and space, which reconstructs the last ten years of Jansen's production through three different stages. The exhibition at the Triennale, in fact, proposing twelve large-scale canvases painted starting from 2013, serves as a prologue to the one-man shows scheduled in the coming months in Germany and at the Queens Museum in New York, thus completely covering a chronological arc that ideally takes us back to 2006, the year in which the volume Modern Urban-Expressionism was published, the first great moment of visibility and international recognition for the artist.
German father, Caribbean mother, born in New York: Jansen, trained in the street-art environment and then matured following the model of the great school of twentieth-century American painting (following Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky). Fundamental to the formulation of his creative language and the construction of his conceptual imagery is the military experience during the First Gulf War (1990 - 1991), during which he served with the airborne troops stationed in Iraq.
The months spent at the front accentuate his deep reflection on the contradictions of contemporary society, especially as regards the influence of the arms industry in the political dynamics of a country like the United States and - in a general sense - the decline in the balance of power between nations, between different visions of management of public affairs, between ruling classes and political parties. Jansen is thus defined by critics as a "cartographer of the conflict": where the term opens up to a much broader context, in fact absolute, compared to the simple reference to his experience as a soldier.
One of the most significant works exhibited in Milan then becomes emblematic, to the point of almost being an ideological manifesto: with Revolutionary Elites, 2016 Jansen works directly on the American national epic, drawing on the iconography of pre-Civil War painting (from Emanuel Leutze to William Ranney) to activate a dramatic and at the same time ironic process of desecration. It is not difficult to recognize, in the pose and clothes of the model portrayed, the fetish of one of the fathers of the country - perhaps George Washington himself - here, however, disfigured, with facial features literally abraded, erased, and with a red mark in the center of the face which can even be an allusion to a clown's nose. An almost heretical act, for a society as iconic as the American one, which requires us to rethink the individual and collective relationship with the symbols of established power, with the sense of belonging to a specific social group.
The disillusionment and at the same time the bewilderment, the estrangement of contemporary man towards the reality in which he has fallen pass, in Jansen's painting, from an intimate dimension to a universal one, transferring to the living environment. In works such as Sitting Ducks, Transitions, Under infrared, Shifts in Nature or the programmatic Orwellian infiltration, a polluted, gloomy and brutalized landscape is charged with new tensions and anxieties, becoming the setting for post-apocalyptic nightmares.
