Marcus Jansen: Victims and Victors

Victims and Victors is a solo exhibition by the American painter Marcus Jansen, which reveals the prejudices of traditional history - a story written mostly by white people, to truly understand it, we need to look at the past from countless angles and angles.

In war, the individuality of the soldier is denied: victory depends on consistency and consensus. To address this, Jensen often focuses on individual combatants, as if to restore their personality and agency. From the painting, the artist brings out the message of "is the most intimate act of war".

In some paintings, the roles of art and combat combine strength. The figure in Creative Genius wears a blood-stained bulletproof jacket and sits cross-legged on the floor. An arm becomes a paintbrush, and the head is replaced by a grey, blocky, tubular sculpture: a rough yellow sun floats over it like a cartoon halo, a mockery of holiness. A painter's palette rests on his lap, but the question remains: how is he going to use it, hurt as he is? In soldiers with PTSD, the head is rendered as what may be a palette or a rough blue keyboard. While wearing a tie was decent, the soldier's body was a mess: he lost a leg, and an arm stuck out as if time had stood still. Another empty bottle was thrown to the ground. Naturally absent: Soldiers are trapped not only in buildings, but in the claustrophobia of their own minds.

His goal was to represent "things that bleed" and to highlight "the toll the military-industrial complex takes on humanity." Having said that, he is also very aware that most commoners also deal with intellectual and emotional conflict, and the characters in some of his recent paintings are made real by their ambiguous nature. To highlight our shared humanity, he often removes easily identifiable gender, race, nationality or religion from his characters. All that's left is a beating heart and a will to survive.
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