Janus Hochgesand

Live Painting

Dancing with Color

Janus Hochgesand (b. Dierdorf, 1981; lives and works in Hamburg) describes his works as “High Intensity Paintings”—pictures defined by the compression of form and content and an unusually concentrated layering of physical material. To make them, the artist uses a broom or vacuum cleaner to abrade pigments liberally poured out over the canvas and reworking the results in iterations of aggregation and ablation. In superimposing paint strata, the artist revisits the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, only to condense these influences in a distinctive performative-painterly practice.

With a foreword by Rene Spiegelberger, a text by Christina Irrgang, and extensive documentation of five performances, the book project Live Paintings invites readers to discover the characteristic artistic process of the artist, whose abstract color-intensive paintings are created in front of an audience and outside the studio. Musicians and actors accompany Janus Hochgesand; they experience the moment of creation and influence the work through their presence. His movements across the canvas spread out on the floor become a dance, the colors materialized sounds.