This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

24th May 2008

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Jean Jansem’s Expressioniste Humaniste opened last week at Johannesburg’s Everard Read gallery amidst a flurry of air kisses and idle chit-chat. The city’s well-to-do denizens flocked to see and be seen at an exhibition by this internationally prized French artist: investors aiming to use those all-important little red dots to secure artworks selling into the millions, socialites enjoying the chance to network or gossip over a glass of red wine.

If this reviewer was more aware than usual of an atmosphere of frivolity and pretension, it is because Jansem’s work is anything but frivolous or pretentious. Indeed, most of the pieces on display in this exhibition are portraits of forlorn and morose-looking women. When their faces are visible, their eyes express regret or anxiety; when their backs are turned, their exposed skin and closed posture make them seem vulnerable.

The works are intriguing precisely because of the tension between, on the one hand, the women’s youth and beauty and, on the other hand, their stasis. Jansem is particularly fond of depicting dancers – not energetic dancers in motion, but dancers at rest, presumably spent after exerting themselves. Indeed, many of the portraits exude a feeling of exhaustion, of world-weariness.

Jansem’s crayon, pencil or charcoal drawings offer pared-down, almost colourless renditions of their subjects, while soft streaks of pastel or watercolour add a minimal emphasis to items of clothing: a bandanna or headscarf, a ballet-shoelace, a piece of cloth draped over the body. His oil paintings, by comparison, seem rich with colour – bold yellows, soft blues – but the settings (mostly interiors) remain sparse, pale and indistinct.

In both drawings and paintings, the female subjects are physically striking, with gaunt bodies and long, thin limbs that flex at sharply pointed elbows, shoulders, knees and ankles, or end in wrinkled hands and feet; but, at the same time, the unsure and broken lines that sketch the contours of their bodies both suggest physical frailty and give the figures an incorporeal quality. This effect is exaggerated in Jansem’s more recent work – as an octogenarian, he has joked about the difficulty of keeping a steady hand, but the “shaking” merely foregrounds the uneasy demeanour of the women in his pictures.

Very few of the subjects are named. Apart from the titles that indicate, simply, “Femme” or “Femmes”, there are descriptions gesturing towards studies or technical exercises: nudes in a particular setting or position (“Nu Assis Fond Jaune”, “Nu au Fichu Vert”, “Nu au Japon”) or dancers categorised in the same way (“Danseuse sur Fond Rouge”, “Danseuses au Repos”). More often than not, the women are described in terms of their clothing (“Le Bandeau Vert”, “Le Turban Blanc”, “Modèle à la Robe Dégrafée”). Here, then, we have generic – or perhaps archetypal – images of female inquietude. Their very anonymity allows the viewer to place them in symbolic or mythical tropes: the mourning Mary, the suffering Sylphide.

Bound up in this is the ancient relationship between male artist and female subject, and the gaze of desire that defines it. One senses in Jansem’s depersonalised, de-individualised depictions of women an awareness of this gaze, and perhaps an ironic inversion of it. The effect of his representations is not to objectify women, but the reverse: he portrays women who seem to have suffered from such reification yet remain withholding, unwilling to surrender their identity to the viewer.

Not all of the works displayed in Expressioniste Humaniste are of solitary female figures or isolated groups of women. A handful of works dating back a decade or more depict carnivalesque scenes, bordering on the nightmarish, that conflate the erotic and the corrupt or decaying. “La Vie et la Mort” (1994) is a kind of memento mori in which newborn babies are handed to aged men and young women lie on their deathbeds. “Dionysies au Crucifié” (1999) gestures towards bacchanalian excess, but – caught between the binaries of the pagan orgy and the prostrate Christ – the faces of the figures in this scene remain impassive.

In the more recent “Mariage au Fifre” (2003), the participants wear expressions more suited to a funeral than a wedding: perhaps a wry comment on the artist’s struggle to win over his audience. This plight is made explicit in "Pierrot à la Palette", with the slumped figure of a painter-clown who is downcast and, probably, down-and-out. “Cortège au Fifres” (1982), the oldest piece in the exhibition, offers a more ambiguous version of the artistic vocation as these musicians’ faces remain hidden behind masks.

What, then, does it mean to dub Jansem an “expressioniste humaniste”? His humanism is thick with pathos, infused with an awareness of the fragility of both the human form and, in that overworn phrase, ‘the human condition’; nevertheless, his work – subtle and even, at times, minimalist – eschews the angst-ridden affect often associated with expressionism.