Ann Veronica Janssens

entre le crépuscule et le ciel

2 July – 9 October 2022

entre le crépuscule et le ciel, Collection Lambert, from July 2nd to October 9th

“How to show, without betrayal, the simple things drawn between dusk and sky?”

René Char

This spring summer 2022 Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens has been invited for a dual exhibition at the Collection Lambert and the Fondation CAB (Saint-Paul-de-Vence). In Avignon she has created an installation on the first floor of the Hôtel de Montfaucon that responds to a previously unseen selection of artworks by Dan Flavin, on show in the ground floor gallery spaces. In Saint-Paul-de-Vence, at the other extremity of Provence, she has created a situation in which her work mirrors the Avignon installation and resonates with the history of the two exhibition sites.

The project was conceived between France and Belgium, over the course of long conversations during journeys on the roads of southern France, driving from one end of Provence to the other, through landscapes affected by climatic variations. The shifting, heady Provence light was a constant presence, influencing the experience of the spaces envisaged for the exhibitions and the route connecting them.

The title of the project emerged quite naturally from the singular work of poetry La Postérité du Soleil, fruit of the meeting of René Char, Albert Camus, and Henriette Grindat on the Luberon roads, not far from the Papal City. The presence of light in these photographs and texts, its affect upon the land, objects, and beings, whose existence it reveals, would constitute the starting point of a new journey in the company of the artist and her work in the galleries of the Collection Lambert and the Fondation CAB.

On the first floor of the Hôtel de Montfaucon, Ann Veronica Janssens has chosen to reveal the twenty-six windows that punctuate the route of the visitor, letting the light traverse the space from one side to the other. Through a series of sculptures, installations, and floor paintings, in which light is experienced in different states – reflected, absorbed, captured, transformed – situations in which our affected bodies and minds constantly navigate between contemplation and immersion, Ann Veronica Janssens invites us to an experience in which the tension between dissolution and resolution is indefinitely reinvented, beside us and with us. “Her use of light as a tool, material, science and symbol of the space that we share takes us out of our routine relationship with it”, to borrow the words of Mieke Bal, and invents the possibility of new relationships, in perpetual renewal.

5766 chemin des Trious, Fondation CAB, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to April 6th to September 11th

By naming the Saint-Paul-de-Vence installation 5766 chemin des Trious – the exact address of the exhibition – Ann Veronica Janssens follows happily in the footsteps of certain key artists of the 1960s and 70s new avant-garde, of whom the Fondation CAB holds some important works. Giving the precise location of the activation, the encounter, and the experience in store, as the title of the exhibition, is to summon memories of Stanley Brouwn’s actions or sculptures (notably the portraits he makes using a metal rod exactly the same size as the subject); On Kawara’s Date Paintings and other Locations in which the lone statement of geographical coordinates invites us to mentally visualise a determined site; or even the raw materiality of Dan Flavin’s light installations, whose famous mantra “It is what it is”, brings the work back to the exact reality of its presence, alongside us, in the spaces it occupies.

Furthermore, from the outset – via the choice of title – the artist seems to announce the idea that presides over every monographic presentation of her work: that each intervention is inarguably situated in a specific space-time. Behind the simplicity of the words 5766 chemin des Trious, hides not only an address, but also the promise of an unprecedented art experience, an encounter whose forms we start imagining as soon as we embark upon the journey to the aforementioned destination.

The exhibition’s catalogue “entre le crépuscule et le ciel” will be published with Actes Sud editions.

Curator of both exhibitions : Stéphane Ibars

With the great support of galleries Esther Schipper, Micheline Szwajcer

and Wallonie-Bruxelles International