贾恩·考克斯认领

During the War Antwerp was occupied by the Nazi's Jan Cox shared his studio with Mendelson and De Gruyter his Jewish friends....Hiding.His early works are influenced by work from Picasso. The development of a new narrative however will become a mayor element in his quest for an intellectual content.

Portraits of friends take an important part in Jan Cox’s oeuvre. Two exhibitions on the theme where organized; ‘the Boston portraits’ in New York in 1965 and ‘Friends of De Zwarte Panter’ in Antwerp in 1978. Important for Cox is to capture the uniqueness of the person and the rhythm and color-aura the person evokes in the artists mind.Mineta House

Jan Cox did not illustrate the myth of Orheus but updated it by projecting his own experience in it. By not accepting his fate he goes on a conquest for the return of the lost love. The path deviates however from its purpose with fatal consequences. ‘Here lies Eurydice in her radiating beauty, but the threatening disaster is already floating above her’ (Jan Cox)

After ten years of bloody war between the Trojans and the Greeks. Troy is completely destroyed and depopulated and the survivors return home. The result is an unreal emptiness in which only the ghost of the past nightmare still hang in the air. Jan Cox’s drive to elaborate the Iliad project was to share the humanitarian message of love, deceit, power and destruction.

Between 1951 and 1956 Jan Cox will be represented by the New York gallery Curt Valentin. The increased financial security gives the artist a confidence that leads to exceptional works. The dead of Socrates and the first works on the Myth of Orpheus confirm his strong identification with his European origin. His lyrical expressionism culminates in irrational confrontations, characterized by the pictorial quality of the image and its psychological dimension.

An intellectual and humanist Cox rejected the utopia of communist social realism and total abstraction. He chooses a combination of figurative and abstract elements that enhances the visual power of the humanist message of his work. This eclectic attitude came spontaneous by talent and integrates surrealism, expressionism and abstraction into a unique personal expression

Jan Cox’s existential pain, the lack of artistic understanding he endured, the mental desperation, the doubt, the treason, the despair and other marginal feelings were as many stages in his personal suffering that he called ‘the Calvary’. Humanity individualized in the figure of Christ. (Creation of art as existential category, Claire Van Damme, Jan Cox, Living one’s art p. 330)

Comrades –in-arms usually take group photos in memory of their heroic time. Here they stand together rather grotesquely with the sign of death already upon them. Jan Cox’s drive to elaborate the Iliad project was to share the humanitarian message of love, deceit, power and destruction.

Cox identifies himself with Orfeus, his art will not be able to regain Eurydice and love is unattainable. In Judith and Holofernes, the conflict between sexes turns toward a not understanding of the feminine psyche with even disastrous consequences. The turbulent forms and the smirking figures in the background are the expression of sarcasm towards his destiny. About woman the artist confirms ‘Any woman is a potential Judith, the woman can also kill the man she seduced’Mineta House