November 1998 Beauty under the sign of paradox Contemporary artists are fond of placing themselves on the fringe of a given school or trend, as a watermark of one or several -ism classifications. However, instead of listing the conventional landmarks of the movements outside where Janetzky places his work, my point is to introduce it under the sign of paradox and simultaneity. The first paradox is a bit of a wink: in 1974, a jury chaired by Benjamin F Forgey, the renowned art critic from the Washington Star News, chose to nominate an canvas called ERIDANUS V by artist Luc Janetzky  for The Founders ' Award for Best Painting in The Traditional Manner. He was awarded the prize. The deliberate option to characterize his “Manner” as  “Traditional” is likely to take aback even a well-informed art lover. How does his stellar turmoil, how do his red lead storm clouds, bubonic bronze and vinyl-molding quasars go about to perpetuate a tradition? How do Kaolin comets that burst out of the frame succeed in reflecting the teachers of yesteryear's masters? Traditionally, painting confronts two irreconcilable elements with one another. One one hand, there is matter. In this case, a primed canvas, fillings of various metals and ground pigments. Matter is exposed to physical processes, which gradually extend their potential and kinetic scope as science registers new progress. Nowadays, it has become unthinkable to grasp eruptions, corrosion or metamorphoses in the light of state of the art research without putting the notion of space to the question, without considering ignorance gaps between photons, acknowledging the random nature of any form of disintegration, learning to violate inequalities. It is now obvious that the visible is but a transitional, perhaps deceptive state of an extensive range of complex interactions. Matter, of course, has always been aware of this. However, science did not compel ancient masters to take this into account while they were painting. On the other hand, there is a conceptual thought. This refers to the raw concept rather than to highbrow computation of the rectangle's inner organization. The artist conceives an “object” before actually shaping it up (Spinoza rightfully pointed out that the concept of a dog is unable to bark); and this process is governed by the fruits of a variety of lessons, perceptions and research work. It used to be the case and still applies to Janetzky. However, no matter what materials the artists resorts to, his technique will be subject to natural law and to their antithesis. Although at this point the reader expects me to explain how the artist reconciles those antinomian elements, I am inclined to raise the question as to whether-for the viewer-gaining the privilege of witnessing the tension created would not be the crux of the matter? Nowadays, the realms of the invisible (Italian art critic Ivano DinarO summarized Janetzky by describing a  painter gifted with an undeniable perception of both the visible and invisible world) are those of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. It boils down to the famous expression engraved on Hermes' emerald Table: What is above is like what is below. The painter has a concept; the latter “works” provided that the form given to it by the artist transposes those minute or titanic tensions that govern it. In this way, spontaneous beauty is achieved, the beauty through which Spinoza's dog can bark at last. The invisible world neither refers to the artist's psychological meanders nor to his emotional ups and downs. When Janetzky summons the inner world, he probes blood, bone or scar tissues, cell walls, molecules and possible reflections of planetary aspects within the human body's secretions. Transference or repression are uninteresting when it comes to pictorial research. When the extensive range of his explorations leads him t o representational work, his sense of humor asserts itself in a more compelling way, without prejudice to the uncompromising nature of his approach. This aspect is strikingly illustrated by his allegoric representations of the signs of zodiac; or by his embrace in which he attains and through which he shares delight while striving for the essence by implementing a basic, refined style of drawing. A further paradox, notwithstanding occasional fits of exuberance, Luc Janetzky refrains from letting intimate concerns taint his pictorial expression. The content of the canvas should not depend on his state of mind. He is confident-and rightly so- that his emotional life is uninteresting to the viewer and should by no means seep through his work. Like Willem de Kooning, whose aphorism Janetzky likes to quote: The Painter is the person that keeps working, whether he is happy or unhappy, let us demystify the artist, whose profession mainly consists in taking fun seriously, in being passionate in contradicting himself. German art critic Dr H Lober raised this other paradoxical nature in 1967, on the occasion of an exhibition at Münsters Clasing Gallery:  Eigentlich revoltiert er mit Hilfe der Abstraktion gegen die Abstraktheit in der Kunst (In fact, he uses abstraction to rebel againstabstractness in art). If indeed the Bauhaus movement culminated in pureness of design subject to a function-rather than painting, Luc Janetzky studied Decorative Arts at La Cambre, under M Gevers, even though Paul Delvaux taught monumental painting just next door-Janetzky's painting acquires its gushing,outpouring features by virtue of the emerging function. This flash intruded on him at an early stage, when the slimy reticence of his middle-class environment still held him back from dedicating his life to fine arts. The quest of beauty is an inborn feature of a great number of men, and beauty has remained unexplained for a great number of centuries. Critics suggested a variety of designations to characterize his work, namely abstract expressionism, microscopic painting, cosmic lyricism. He himself claims kinship to “hedonism without excluding meaningful tracks”. However, when someone called his work “quantum painting”, it definitely rang a bell with Janetzky. He is not indifferent to the poetry of quantum physics, hence of quantum philosophy: “the wave associated to a corpuscle is not a single, monochromatic wave( which would have an unlimited range in space) but rather a group of waves, a  bundle of waves. Those Cyclopean outbreaks and golden rifts that tear open his composite canvases are reflections of microscopic lesions, of the principle of indetermination to which quanta remain (un)submissive by nature. All one knows about the atom are the frequency and intensity of its light emissions. When a galaxy moves away from us, the light it emits is reddened in proportion to the speed at which it is moving. Red shifts are used t o estimate the distances of galaxies from the Earth. Janetzky's purulent contours, gilded or silvery, his cadmium reds, streaks of sepia or splinters of bronze do not ensue from accurate scheming. Nevertheless, they undoubtedly reflect a genuine mastery of the freedom granted to the materials. Powdered metals are treated according to a process of the artists invention to keep the canvases from oxidizing. The painter chooses corrosion agents. Cobalt blue and orange – kept apart from graphical elements- will scarify the way Janetzky had fore casted, even though his manner of control cannot be characterized as coercive: tension and sensitivity reconcile the components of the paradox. Certain meteors will burst out of the frame. It occurs that a canvas must be amputated from such growths before it “works”. There is something of the demurring in him, who feverishly seeks the assurance required to set the prospective turmoil of a shapeless magma. In 1966, Brigitte Malou already wrote:  Janetzky bursts the screen of his canvases.  At the time, he had an exhibition in Lille and his works where christened Betelgeuse or Vega II. His very first exhibitions(at the Galleria Indice in Milan in 1964 and in the Maison des Arts in Schaerbeek, Brussels, in the same year- where member of the Academy Pierre Nothomb opened th preview with a speech that is still deeply engraved in Janetzky's memory) had been a difficult step for  him to take. His interior designer's diploma from La Cambre had initially led him to train at Gio Ponti's in Milan, and he sometimes regrets having left the latter so early. At the time, the fact that he felt so attracted to aesthetic design generated by the function it had to fulfill still held him back from devoting his carer exclusively to painting. Of course he found an additional paradox to balance out his artist's life: integration into society to him as is just as important as his denial of schools and trends. His sense of osmosis found his true dimension as he made contacts with those cultures towards which his profession steered him. Italy at first, then Paris and particularly London and Washington D.C. Both taught him to put things into perspective and endowed him with expressive maturity. He partly absorbed these due to his power of integrating foreign elements without diluting his emerging pictorial idiom. He found himself a niche in Anglo-Saxon culture without giving up the slightest shred of his artist's self, which originated on the Old Continent. The unquestionable effect of those paradoxes on any art lover( I recall a phrase that is seemingly attributed to Poliakoff, saying  When you look at a canvas, forget what you know. Eat your eye out.) is a challenge in itself. Janetzky's painting can, at times, induce restlessness. The lava on his canvases can be rigid and clotted, crackled or blistered, now in fusion, then undergoing a glaring mutation. Louis Pasteur used to claim that chance would only favor well-prepared spirits. Within the framework of this ultimate paradox, Janetzky's deisms bring forth geometry of chance and necessity. Steve Dept