By Jano Xhenseval

Text published in Esprits Libres, Spring 2000, “What Should Be Preserved?”, L’Harmattan.

Jano Xhenseval, a painter born in Liège, has been working in Paris for over forty years. She has created stained glass, tapestries, engravings, bookbindings, and drawings. Her pictorial work evokes a vast palimpsest where, as she says herself, “all the memories of the world” have found refuge. Here, she reflects on her daily artistic choices. “What do I keep? What do I discard?” The choice, though not burdensome, is significant as it introduces itself into the very life of the work. Welcome to the studio for readers curious to continue this exploration in the joy of looking together.

On my work table resides a collection of small unfinished paintings, waiting for I know not what to lift them out of their isolation, for if they are there, it is because they have not yet entered the life of the work.

Their wandering keeps inviting me to work, to open myself, to paint.

If the gaze visits these inert harmonies with each passing, if it sweeps over this expanse of color, it is in the hope of detecting some music, some fragments of opening... or completion.

This little painted wood that awaited a certain ultramarine—I passed by it a hundred times without seeing or understanding it. The difficulty is not in finding the right tone but in eliminating, one by one, those that sully, burden, or confine.

Vacant light is infinite; it compels and refines at the same time. Precise, it will have the same force as that lacerated stroke, necessary, optically assured—it enjoins me to respond “openly.”

There is a moment of intervention to liberate the color—by which I mean the light—a primordial time, devoid of trajectory, that decides and concludes.

This imperative discernment can only be achieved with the aid of memory. Yet this memory must meet originality and command: patience.

That moment marks an election of a different order than expected, but it eliminates clumsy temptations.

It is better to know nothing of all this and to pass and repass before these colored things, in recognition of what escapes—where all the memories of the world have sought refuge.

The separation from mediocre things does not erase mediocrity but frees me from having to fear it! It is a way to dance with shadows.

My childhood painting teacher said, “Today we are going to learn to make shadows.” Never did I hear him say, “We are going to learn to paint the light.”

One does not learn light; one does not paint light. It is given, already reserved on the first day of the world, introduced before the work... liquid... initial... the cradle of the soul. There is nothing to say about it, to bruit about it: it speaks!