Springs of divine colours, funeral speech to painting
	Eha Komissarov

	I saw Jan's exhibition at the Gent Modern Art Museum and I can clearly remember falling under the spell of his work, and being amazed at what was about to happen. Jan prepared you, being a real master in such things, for facing problems and disputes that all the curators of modern art have learned to avoid. Imschoot offered cultural dialogue, without concealing his intention to raise the prestige of the art of painting. And this did not seem in the least ridiculous. It is difficult to describe Jan's strategy because it is so incredibly many-layered. He can be in a dialogue with a hundred things - tackling the files of European art history of centuries ago, Jan springs into action, encouraging discussions about the fate and place of painting, evoking outrage and observations about complicated relationships, offering a genuine contemporary deconstructivist thought, etc. To me Jan offered a totally new experience of the hidden blood circulation of European culture with its roots, and I am happy that in Gent he succeeded to momentarily upset my treatment of identity that derived from another cultural context. At the Tallinn exhibition, the section of his work, already seen in Gent, was clearly connected with allegories about the continuity of painting, and bore a most sophistic title, Springs of Divine Colours, Funeral Speech to Painting. Dance Macabre for an Unknown Princess that we carefully planned during his previous visit to Tallinn, in the end turned out quite different from what I had expected.
	I had experienced that Jan takes the religious topics in art as part of a great drama, making use of the symbols of Christian doctrines just like a representative of horror-literature. Influenced by the passionately intolerant heroes with dark souls, whom I saw in Gent, and who schizophrenically amplify the jumbled prose of the Bible stories, I expected a sequel in the vein of the Tallinn Danse macabre, and prepared myself for the revival of medieval horrors of death. As is often the case with talented artists, Jan's behaviour is unpredictable. Jan provided the Tallinn St. Nicholas church's Flemish art collections and the display of old art in Kadriorg palace with an angle where the horror side of the Danses macabres is left aside and dance reigns supreme. Jan's princess story is a fairy tale, a remarkably beautifully and delicately developed game with projections of a woman that are sustained by man's unconscious. Jan offered fantasies of a woman, put together of women's archetypes that circulate in culture. The Virgin Mary and seductive nymph, whose exciting unity can only be perceived at vague symbolic levels of imagination. It is wonderful to enter Jan's idealised princess image when you allow yourself to think that what we see here is a projection of a male anima. The divine princess with white arms and carmine red nails, whose diffusive biography is intertwined with symbols speaking about the Virgin Mary. In the spirit of famous Belgian surrealist traditions, Jan fetished the princess as much he could, but from the dim phantasms where the ego meets the most hidden sides of the soul, emerges something so familiar to Jan as faith in the divine superiority of intellectual world of imagination. This is by no means Jan's own credo. The Tallinn exhibition revealed the prominent Flemish painter Jan van Imschoot's strong relationship with reality in society. His series of portraits of mentally retarded people clearly showed that this was not a case of Ego seeking hedonistic adventures in pictures. When you think about the complicity of Jan, you end up perceiving the expanses of culture. Jan himself describes his difficult mission as a painter as follows: 'As a human being I must think ethically, reflect what is human, our society and world. As a painter I naturally need paints, but also historical topics, humour, meanings and imagination. As an artist I seek the balance between the human and the artistic.' Eha Komissarov (1947) is art critic and curator of the Art Museum of Estonia and Vaal-Gallery
	| Estonian Art 1/04 (14) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2004 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |