On the web you can find a digital globe called 'Google Earth'. This globe has been constructed by merging satellite pictures and arial photographs, and it enables you to zoom in on The Hala Ludowa in Wroclaw for example, or any other significant landmark for that matter. From macro cosmos to the human size, it is programming enginuity at its best.
What do you see when you zoom in from outer space to the surface of the earth? You may find that the outcome of man’s twiddling on earth bears a profound resemblance to the growth of a colony of bacteria in a petri dish, or ice crystals appearing on a cold window pane. Zoom in on any city and notice the similarity. Among the blues and greens of the earth, there it is all of a sudden, a stain, whose structure seems to comply with mathematical laws, or which has fallen victim to the brute indifference of chaos. In places the earth’s surface looks rusty or seems to have fallen victim to moulds. When you zoom in closer however, these places turn out to be cities or other marks of human activity. Google Earth enables you to behold the earth 'oculus dei', with the look of an Old Testament God or a returning moonastronaut. When you have already taken the seat of the Almighty in your imagination, the next step is an easy one: to rid this perfect globe of those ugly stains with one swipe of your Divine, slightly moistened, finger. Watch man’s accomplishments disappear in one straight brush, no more that a spec of dirt in the eye of the most Heavenly Beholder. Where the Bible, Coran and Tora no longer succeed in our secularised Western society, a gadget on the internet manages to teach us a formidable lesson in humility.
Rogier Janssen is a modern landscape painter. As such he falls in line with a long-standing tradition in the low countries. Dutch landscape painting has always been characterised by a rather businesslike approach to the subject. Attention to the effects of light and the use of optical aids are part of this tradition. The works of Janssen exhibit all of these features. Holland abounds in man-made landscapes. There are hardly any places to be found in the country that do not show the traces of human alteration. To use a term from commerce, the landscape also has a remarkably high turnover rate. Buildings, or road or water works that lose their function are quickly broken down and replaced by other shapes, structures or objects. Every few decades the country changes beyond recognition. The high pace of development results in a country that is thoroughly urbanised, recent, uniform and ugly. The cold approach seems to deny history its role in an organic growth of the landscape. The arcadian landscape from the painting tradition is anywhere but here. A country like a machine. These cold facts reflect in Janssen’s paintings. The lack of any historic context in the present, highly utilitarian Dutch landscape has resulted in images that seem to pick up on the poetry of this landscape. A painting of a gsm antenna oozes menace, simply because such an modern, everyday object is chosen as the subject of a painting. The subject invokes questions of the sort to which extent society and human relationships are intertwined by data flows and radio frequencies.
Another feature of Janssen’s landscapes is that man himself is the great absentee, when traces of human activity are everywhere to be seen. The landscape has always been touched or polluted by mankind. The typically arcadian landscape is a small paradise, unpolluted, in which humans happen to repose. Janssen’s landscapes are, as it were, anti-arcadian: man has just left and in most cases he has made a mess of the landscape. Most of the painting ‘Waalbruggen’ (Bridges over the river Waal) for example consists of the painted representation of a mud field, in which cars and trucks have left their tracks.
The upper half of the painting shows the old road bridge over the river Waal, near Zaltbommel. This was once the busiest traffic junction in Holland, but it lost this function 15 years ago. The bridge is partly closed by a road block. On its left a few brushes outline the railway bridge, on its right the new road bridge appears. A place with its own history, portrayed in all its muddy glory, probably soon to be brushed out of the landscape. A Dutch-style vanitas metaphore. The same goes for the German-Dutch border crossings: rendered obsolete by historic events they have been abandoned to neglect and decay. Perhaps it is because Janssen lives in a county that denies history that time has become the recurring theme of his landscapes.
