THE CORE AND THE ESSENCE *

- The essence inherent in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens

Angela van der Burght

With its panoramic landscapes, sheer blue sky, overwhelming southern light, yellow ochre earth, purple fields, vibrantly coloured roses and piercing mistral, the South of France is the country of the Impressionists.

“The Midi fires the senses: makes your hand more agile, your eye sharper, your brain clearer.” Vincent van Gogh

According to the guide Insight Guides: France: “While Impressionism emerged inParis, Provence was the creative melting pot between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first of the 20th. Claude Monet and Jean Renoir, two leading lights, were entranced by the seductive landscape and intoxicating southern light. In their footsteps came French and foreign post-Impressionists, from Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to Paul Cézanne, the greatest of them all. The wave of avant-garde artists continued, from Picasso and Braque in their Cubist incarnations, to Chagall, Matisse and Dufy. Van Gogh and Gauguin are associated with Arles, Cézanne with Aix, while Signac and Matisse are linked to Saint Tropez andNice. The Nabis were post-Impressionists who styled themselves as followers of Gauguin. Bonnard, the painter of sensations, lived in a hillside villa above Cannes. Les Fauves, founded by Henri Matisse in 1905, were dubbed “wild beasts” for their fondness for lurid colours. Other Fauves included André Derain, Dufy, Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Braque. After passing the winter of 1916-17 in Nice, Matisse settled there. One of his most important works is the chapel in Vence. Pablo Picasso lived on the Côte d'Azur, notably in Antibes and Juan les Pins, and worked on Cubism with Georges Braque in Céret in 1911. Picasso spent much of his life on the Mediterranean coast, and in 1946 he was given the keys of the Grimaldi Palace in Antibes to use as a studio. The château is now home to the Musée Picasso. Another French artist, Jean Cocteau, came on holiday to Villefranche in 1925, and stayed to decorate the chapel of St Pierre and the mayor’s office in Menton. At the end of the Second World War many artists were drawn to the South of France. Russian-born Marc Chagall settled in St Jean Cap Ferrat in 1949, where the azure blue light and seascapes inspired the artist with new ideas.”

It is no wonder, then, that the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (www.culture.fr) invited Ann Veronica Janssens from Brussels, Belgium to glaze the medieval Chapelle Saint-Vincent in Grignan. Her interest in light, colour, time, space, the atmosphere and other elusive, intangible things that she applies in her work, like reflection, projection, absorption and diffusion, can be found in this site-specific installation of glass monoliths, in which, like a modern alchemist, she expresses the essence of her subjects.

A public commission is the expression of the will of the State, in the form, in this case, of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, along with a number of partners such as municipalities, public institutions and private partners, to contribute to the enrichment of the national heritage and of life in general, by the presence of works of art outside the more restricted confines of institutions that specialise in the field of contemporary art.

Situated a short distance to the south east of Montélimar on the Route du Soleil, Grignan is located in the Drôme department, in the Rhône-Alpes region (www.guideweb.com/grignan and www.tourisme-paysdegrignan.com).
The website of the municipality of Grignan states: "The Chapel of Saint-Vincent by the Cemetery is the oldest monument in Grignan. Constructed in a primitive Romanesque style, the chapel dates from the eleventh century. The purity of its facade and the regularity of its construction in narrow bonding combine to produce an extraordinary building. The chapel was mentioned in a bull of Pope Paschal II of 24 April 1105, was a dependency of the Priory of Les Tourrettes and was the parish church from 1280 until the fifteenth century”. The interior is as impressive as the exterior. However, the apse, vaulted in a half dome, seems to have undergone numerous changes."

The glass that we use today to make objects and window glass is usually soda-lime glass, comprising a mixture of lime, soda carbonate, silicates and aluminum oxide. The melting batch for the glass used for this project consisted of lead-free soda potassium, and after the glass blocks came into being it was melted into refractory open moulds.
As a general rule in past times, producing colored glass was a hit-and-miss affair and the result of trial and error, as in the case of the colloidal gold used for the first time in the Elixir of Life or Ormus and later in glass. Already known in antiquity, this synthesis was first consciously applied in medieval glass for stained-glass windows. According to the website www.crucible.org, although the Egyptians were familiar with the medicinal power of gold, it was the great alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) who used this knowledge for the first time. He called his purple solution Aurum Potable; it could cure any disease because gold drew its power from the sun, the heart of the world that communicates with our hearts and removes all uncleanness from it.

Janssens chose the colours for the monoliths on the basis of the movement of the sun: blue for the north, with cold light, pink for the east, with bright, cheerful light in the morning and a cooler radiance in the afternoon, and yellow-green for the intense southern light and gold-orange for the setting of the sun.

PINK
One of the best-documented examples of nanotechnology is medieval coloured glass. As the first nanotechnologists avant la lettre, the early alchemists captured the gold in the glass mass in order to manufacture the ruby red and pink by dissolving the gold. The Romans used it in the colors of bright yellow, brown and red glass, but it was not until 1679 that ruby glass was invented by using gold chloride. The site www.chemheritage.org explains that gold was used by alchemists in their experiments aimed at creating red glass and yellow glass silver. Recently scientists have analysed medieval window glass and have discovered that the glass used in this technique, which probably dates back to the 10th century, contains nano-particles of gold and silver that work as quantum-dots to reflect the red and yellow light.

GREEN
The green window is made of uranium glass, the application of which dates backs to at least 79 AD and which was found in a yellow mosaic stone with 1% uranium oxide found in a Roman villa on Cape Posillipo in the Bay of Naples. In the Middle Ages, uraninite or pitchblende from the Habsburg silver mines in Joachimsthal, Bohemia was used, and the ore autunite found in Autun, France was used by the local glass industry to colour glass. Martin Klaproth (1743–1817), the discoverer of uranium, later experimented with the use of this element as a glass colouring agent. The Bohemian Josef Riedel separated uranium salts from pitchblende around the year 1835. He added these salts to glass and the result was a bright yellow-green glass that he called Anna after his wife. Nowadays, uranium oxides are used.

AMBER
Glassmakers can make an orange and yellow amber color by mixing a combination of iron sulphides in the presence of a reducing agent such as carbon. The exact tone of amber depends on the amount of carbon added to the mix in the form of charcoal, coal or wood chips.

COBALT
Cobalt glass is a deep blue colored glass prepared by adding cobalt oxide to the mix. Ground cobalt glass is called smalt and is historically important as a pigment in painting, pottery, decoration of other types of glass and ceramics and other media.

Together with his son, the master mason and stone-cutter Christian Fontaine placed the four heavy monoliths in their openings. With simple scaffolding, block and wooden wedges, he was able to lift and put in place the heavy window sculptures with a cut-away of one centimeter around them, enabling them to stand in the wall. Jan-Willem van Zijst of Fenestra Ateliers assisted in the production of the glass monolites, the composition of the colors, and the kiln-forming, grinding, polishing and sandblasting, as well as the transportation. The members of the team also included Charles Cohy (intermediary, Visual Arts), Jan Fordeyn (engineer) and Prof. Rob Nijs. In the background, Jean-Pierre Couren of Culture et patrimoine Grignan was constantly present, with his irrepressible drive, to tie up any loose ends.

Grignan is a brave statement in the enrichment of glass!

The official opening of the chapel will take place on 25 May

Angela van der Burght © November 2012
Translation James Benn, Brussels