ROBERT JANITZ
AND THE BACKSIDE OF PAINTING
By Gwenaël Kerlidou, June 27, 2025
1001 Nights (+1)
CANADA, 60 Lispenard St., NY
5/29 to 7/11
Robert Janitz, Untitled, 2025, 25 × 20 inches, oil, wax, flour on linen, courtesy of CANADA.
This is Robert Janitz third one-person show at Canada in the last 10 years. His previous exhibitions with this gallery took place in 2022, and in 2018 as a double show in collaboration with Anton Kern. Prior shows in New York include the Team Gallery in 2015 and 2014 and Shoot The Lobster in 2012.
A consummate multilingual cosmopolitan, the German born artist lived in Paris from 1996 to 2009, then in New York between 2009 and 2020, and is now based in Mexico City. He has been exhibiting widely internationally as well in the last few years: His most recent projects were in Essen, Germany and at Casa Siza, Mexico City.
What this extensive nomadism would seem to imply is that Janitz’s work might not necessarily fit neatly into clear cultural categories or be reduced to a set of issues specific to a particular art-scene at a particular time. One might be hard pressed to find that his paintings are more European than American, for example. But, as they say, and as we will see below: “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop » (Shoo off your natural impulses and they’ll come back to haunt you with a vengeance), as, in the coherence of his work, one may sense a certain interest with what could be perceived here as more historically aligned “German” concerns.
Janitz’s former interventions at Canada, were primarily focused on large abstract paintings of wide uninterrupted gestures zigzagging over horizontal or vertical gradient backgrounds ranging from yellow to red or green to blue, such as “Tijuana Moods," 2019 (not included in this show). Covering the entire surface in one sweep, like the efficient moves of a window washer, and in a kind of alphabet letter pattern of M, N, W or Z shapes, the gesture in these paintings registered more as a fading trace than as an expressive brush mark. In the last few years this striking configuration of gestures over gradients has become a kind of signature style of the artist’s work.
Made from an unusual combination of pigment, wax and flour, a thick paint paste is spread over the canvas surface like mayonnaise on a sandwich which slowly dries out to become almost translucent in the end. The brush marks remain visible only from their outlines, evoking the ghosts of a trace while the background colors re-emerge through the field of the paint stroke.
To get a better grasp of where Janitz’s distinctive “ghost of a trace” comes from, a short survey of the different functions of the gesture in painting from the early nineteen-fifties onward might be useful: Starting from the form producing existential gesture of the Ab-Ex generation (Kline, de Kooning, etc.) through the post-structuralist -more than postmodern- gesture as self-critical language (David Reed, Jonathan Lasker) to the gesture as trace, and trace as protocol/strategy for producing paintings (Lee Ufan, Bernard Frize). What binds Reed, Frize and Janitz together in their approach to gesture is their shared reliance on the mediation of an idiosyncratic paint medium, be it alkyd based, resin or wax mixed with flour, and to their attention to the tools (wide brushes, scrapers, combs, etc.) used in the application of the medium to the painted surface.
Concurrently to his big abstract signature paintings, Janitz has also been developing and presenting smaller paintings of a single dense cluster of brushstrokes, often perched on top of a triangular shape which made them function either as expressionist head on shoulders, sometimes reminiscent of Frank Auerbach’s dislocated portraits, or as images of ash clouds erupting over active volcanic cones, a sort of acknowledgement of his new surroundings.
For the present exhibition the artist has opted to develop his connection to “portraiture” more explicitly than ever before. The centered clusters of thickly painted brush marks seem to have finally coalesced into images reminiscent of (perhaps) feminine heads with longish hair seen from behind against a background of dark muted colors.
Also, as in previous shows, Janitz has made a point to interspace his installation with counterarguments to the main theme. In this case, smaller paintings of clusters not referencing heads as directly as the larger ones, looking more like abstract knots, such as “The appearance," 2025 or “Studio Rats," 2025, which both function as variations, counterpoints or antithesis to the show’s central statement.
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Robert Janitz, 1001 Nights (+1), installation view, courtesy of CANADA.
For years Janitz has been developing an ambiguous and complex approach to painting open to absorbing its own contradictions. The question framed by the juxtaposition of these two styles in the same show seems to be mostly about the relationship between abstraction and figuration: About the small degrees of separation between them. About figuration as the return of the repressed (or is it the other way around; abstraction as the return of the repressed?). About what happens when this primordial knot is untied and when the gesture unfolds arbitrarily on either side of the abstraction-figuration continental divide. His ultimate aim seems to be to emphasize the fundamental ambiguity of painting which often means to say something but ends up delivering a different message.
A good example of this might be Gerhard Richter’s and his constant shuffling between abstraction and figuration, which, aside from the usual reading of his work as a postmodern indexing of the figures of representation, could also be seen as an attempt to point out the fundamentally elusive and floating nature of the picture-making process.
But let’s return to the heads; Janitz’s show of brushstrokes as manes of hair could also bring to mind Richter’s (since we’re talking about him) iconic 1988 photorealist portrait of his daughter Betty, where she appears to abruptly turn her head around, as if jolted by something happening behind her, presenting the viewer with a full head of hair instead of a face.
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In New York, coming as they are on the heels of the Caspar David Friedrich’s exhibition at the Met Museum earlier this year, and of the discussions around the role of his Rückenfigur -the figure seen from the back, Janitz’s Rückenköpfe (my own term) beg the question of their relation to Friedrich’s doppelganger stratagem. Let’s examine that stratagem a little closer. In a typical Friedrich painting the viewer is looking at another self-absorbed viewer contemplating a presumed sublime landscape, be it the Baltic Sea or a sea of clouds in the Alps. The actual semantic figure that Friedrich’s work articulates here is that of a double distancing movement. An abolition of distance via a transfer of identification from actual viewer to represented viewer (literally turning their back on the actual viewer -as opposed, for example, to Caravaggio’s figures who, often making eye contact, seem to beg the viewer to bear witness- in which case identification is out of the question), immediately followed by a stepping back from the edge of representation with the understanding that sharing the experience of the represented viewer is forever out of reach and the subsequent realization that the sublime can’t be represented but only experienced. An ethos that the Ab-Ex would embrace much later, substituting experience to representation and thus adding a brand-new phenomenological chapter to the story of the viewer’s relationship to representation.
But what Janitz does is somewhat different. No speculations on the mechanics of the notions of the alter-ego here. Instead, what seems to be at play, as articulated by the artist himself, is a kind of double negation. The first negation consisting of showing the back of a head rather than its face, contrary to what is expected in standard portraiture, and the second one in presenting what could conceivably be construed as the back of a painting as its front, the true front, the fictional face of the portrait, being turned against the wall and unviewable. A double movement of de-negation, bridging across the two levels of the iconographic and the semantic.
If not exactly a widespread approach, the incorporation of the canvas back into a strategy for making paintings is not as unusual as one may think at first. Coming at it from very different angles, a few abstract painters such as Christian Bonnefoi in France, or Ha Chonghyun in South Korea, have used it since the late seventies, as have on these shores, Craig Fisher since the early eighties or Dona Nelson more recently. What is different in this case is that the ever-ambiguous back and forth between abstraction and figuration doubles up with a two-step dance between what we conventionally understand as the front or the back of the canvas.
Rather than a double negation, I would venture that the movement at work here might be closer to a withholding of resolution or of a denying the kind of closure a viewer cannot help but expect from representation, and in so doing highlighting its fundamental instability, the impossibility of ever being sure of exactly what we are looking at, with the feeling of being forever lost in the land of interpretation.
At which point, the viewer may be led to wonder in turn if the denegation at work in the portrait paintings might also apply to the earlier abstractions, and if the backside of these paintings might be portraits, the hidden front of which would remain forever invisible and unseen. In short if figuration might be the backside of abstraction (or is it the other way around?); Two convenient but arbitrary categories, one depending on the other to define itself, two sides of the same coin.
Robert Janitz, 1001 Nights, 2025, 86 × 66 inches, oil, wax, flour on linen, courtesy of
CANADA.
Robert Janitz, Tijuana Moods, 2019, 80 × 60 in, oil, wax, flour on linen, courtesy of CANADA.