‘The idea is to remove
all numbers, all texts, all ideas, all concepts
in order for the visual truth to have a chance to penetrate.
To reveal itself’.

Edward Janssen bio

Edward J’ (1971, Enschede) studied at the gold smithing department in Schoonhoven from 1989 and Rietveld Academy & Piet Zwart Institute until 2003. He performed and exhibited at numerous international podia throughout the world. He lives and works in Amsterdam.
He combines themes like shame, vulnerability and (self) censorship, with formal elements like WHITE (the color) and light and shadow (the phenomenon). Newspapers are a returning element in his work, mainly because they reflect the disruptive power of mass media. He also designs commissioned works for (semi) public spaces.
Apart from being an artist, Edward is also father and trainer-facilitator for companies and entrepreneurs, with the aim to spark and manifest their creative strategies, products, ambitions & ideas.

Edward and his drive to Reframe Shame

Edward Janssen’s Reframing Shame is a brave dive into the past while paradoxically referencing a re-framed future. In the first reading of the title of these works we are invited to investigate the pathology of shame. His tool for this is a powerful and obsessive manufacturing of that sense of shame through repetitious use of newspapers manifested in different shapes with exquisite minimalistic detail reminding us of narratives of erasure. It is this narrative of the erasure of shame through the repetitive production of the shamed object – in this case the newspaper- that Edward Janssen really establishes himself as a Refusenik; while meticulously reproducing an almost erased self in one form, he reframes the narrative of information- the news media- using the same form. This leads us to the other reading of Edward Janssen’s work.

Here we are invited to look on information as the transgressor in need of reframing. It is suggested that the informers of shame, those who would set themselves up as judge and jury of an individual and societies story, are in fact the shamed object in need of reduction and re-framing. This is social critique at its best that uses ones own damage to expose those who inflict damage. The use of an old medium, print, references the long history of that damage and the part that language plays in in the destruction of the soul. Edward J’s minimalism has a grandiosity about it in its repetitive insistence. He brazenly smuggles his personality past the Pretorian guards of social mores, to subtly accuse his accuses. Reframing Shames is a brave work of an artist at the height of his power.

_{more newspaper works see PRIVATE NEWS, PUBLIC NEWSPAPER}

_{read about the process of reframing}