HORST JANSSEN
The drawing Hyacinth Bulb has a white background with just the hint of a table. The bulb’s deep purple is divided by precise black lines girdling it like the longitudal lines of a globe; less clearly delineated leaves sprouting from it at the right and cradling it at the left give the whole an oddly suggestive shape. In the smaller of two watercolors titled Fish Head, the paper itself, stained with whites and grays, is torn at the upper right, neatly mirroring the fish head’s detachment. The head itself is a hulking dark form irregularly stained with splotches of diverse colors; one can almost feel its messy, oily decay.
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While Janssen has obviously been influenced by movements that came long after Durer–romanticism, with its emphasis on a scene’s emotional implications, and expressionism, with its emphasis on the artist’s inner eye–his works have a palpability like Durer’s rare in 20th-century art. But much of his work is Durer with a big difference: instead of the earlier artist’s solid, certain world of healthy nature and true faith, in many of Janssen’s best works we’re given a world of decay.
