Review: Marcus Jansen Examine & Report

There’s a shot late in Emmy Award Winning director John Schoular’s incisive documentary Examine and Report that sums up what’s so fascinating about artist Marcus Jansen and his work.

- Rick Paulas

The shot is black and white, and framed with paint buckets and brushes in the deep foreground. Between their twin silhouettes is the hulking Jansen, walking to the camera through the long length of his warehouse -  style studio, brush swinging in his hand like a construction worker holding a hammer. Jansen’s gait has a steady weariness to it, a subdued pace. He’s not leaping boundless i n spiration, or sullen as the horrors of the world creep it.

He’s simply trudging along, going to work.

At some point in any successful artist’s career, the act itself becomes a job. It’s the source of the paycheck that’s keeping them off the street and with food in their stomachs, and with those pressures come having to occasionally do things you don’t want to. Maybe it’s a piece on commission, or a series of interviews for an art opening. But there’s that other definition of “job,” which is the task that one is simply compelled to do. And in Jansen’s walk in that shot, you see the heft of a worker, commuting to the gig.

“Painting is simply capturing a moment in time,” Jansen says, in the film.