Moving, shimmering landscapes, both joyful and disturbing, natural-looking structures, man-made and yet unusual and strange: The new works – the INNER GREEN FIELDS – by the East Belgian painter Jana Rusch seem both familiar and novel. People, vehicles and streets of the earlier works have disappeared, dynamic, powerful structures and spatial emptiness dominate. They thus also see themselves as a utopia of the human form of existence on earth and challenge us to question old patterns of thought and discuss new living spaces.
„For many years – also as a studied geographer – I have been investigating forms, structures and speeds of human habitats and their development over time. In the case of the INNER GREEN FIELDS, the transformation, the deep fundamental change of these structures with the temporal component and in connection with crisis situations has now been added,“ says Jana Rusch about the new works. These works deal with different or different human structures on earth than those that exist today. The green field here becomes suddenly a vision of the urban, a kind of basis for discussion of the urban structures of the future.
The INNER GREEN FIELDS are large format, moving and visionary. They are about different or novel /new kind of structures on earth than those we find today. We – as humanity – think differently, work differently, economize differently. We generate different forms and structures on this earth.
Although the forms are soft and flowing, the structures dynamic, powerful and urban, the new works appear idiosyncratically blurred, nebulous. „I understand – as a human being and as an artist – the current social situation as a challenge: this crisis exposes and reduces life to the essential, tells a lot about ourselves and our world. It shows very clearly what was previously well hidden and hardly visible. She tells us a lot about who we are, each one of us individually and as a society, and who we only pretend to be. I absolutely believe that right now we have the opportunity to change the world in a good direction,“ the artist formulates her approach to the works. However, she understands them by no means as firmly defined answers, neither to current challenges nor to general social questions, but rather as a basis for discussion, a kind of sketch for visionary changes in the future: What do we really need, what do we want in the future, what is normality? INNER GREEN FIELDS are basically abstract landscapes and yet the content conveys a strong message, only to immediately open up the space again.
„The exciting thing in my profession is the absence of any boundaries. On the canvas I can act, invent and design freely. I can override gravity, statics and physics. In this way, these friendly and extremely strange landscapes allow us to rethink in a very global way,“ Rusch continues. But the connection of these futuristic landscapes to history turns out to be all the more exciting. Jana Rusch has a special penchant for maps as a studied geographer. With the help of transfer printing, she integrates collage-like sections and small details from the Ferraris maps, the first cartographic records of Belgium and parts of Luxembourg to be produced manually by Joseph Johann Ferraris in 1777, into the INNER GREEN FIELDS. This 250-year-old map series exerts a great fascination on Jana Rusch and is a great source of inspiration for her. She takes up many structures found in the maps, expands on them and sends them on an exciting journey into the future. „Ferrari’s cards were also invented to a certain extent at the time of their creation, conceived, and this connects her very much to the INNER GREEN FIELDS,“ says the artist. The small map sections, well hidden in the flickering surface of the large-format landscapes, create a deep rootedness of these landscapes. They are arcs of tension – visually and in terms of content. They are bridges between yesterday and tomorrow, showing only too clearly the disappearance of the today so familiar to us.
„Our new reality, which is emerging so rapidly, becomes more tangible every day. I want to do everything I can to make it a good, a better reality. And I believe in the power of positive thinking as much as I firmly believe that we can change the world by changing ourselves, each one for himself, each one a little bit in his own field,“ the artist said. And she is very committed to this, even outside of canvases.