Esther Janssen

Esther Janssen creates familiar suburban scenes and landscapes that enchant and disturb in equal measure, their seductive surfaces infused with a creeping sense of unease. The artist sews artificial leather into elaborate scenes of lush, yet strictly ordered, neighbourhoods and gardens. They are devoid of people, yet human presence is suggested by the careful (over)cultivation of the surroundings, which gives the works their suffocating, intoxicating beauty. Ultimately, this uncanny perfection is revealed as merely an illusion of control over nature, which can never be fully shaped to our will. The viewer is invited into a universe parallel to our own, the experience alternating between the quotidian and the sublime. 

Esther began using artificial leather in her work in 1999, when she discovered a roll in a junk shop in Eindhoven, but it was not until a decade later that she settled on her technique of sewn paintings. The material mimics the texture of skin, lending the works a plush tactility that she often emphasises with padding to give the image volume. An early adopter of digital imaging technology, the artist has used Photoshop to map out her compositions since the late 1990s. She simplifies shapes and smooths out textures, paring forms down to their essentials before cutting, painting and piecing together individual leather pieces to create each scene. 

The subject matter draws on Esther’s pivotal memories connected to landscape and space, in particular her teenage experience of suburban gardens in Belgium. She also cites the Japanese ukiyo-e artists Hiroshige and Hokusai as important influences, as well as the energy of David Hockney’s paintings and the uncanny filmic worlds of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Her cinematic use of lighting enhances the dramatic mood of scenes in which improbable shadows defy the rules of perspective. She describes this as ‘an illusion that does not disappoint, but reveals itself as an illusion, generating a feeling of possibility in which even banal subjects reveal their sacred essence’.