Morning Toilet 2020

Lech Jankowski made this painting, Morning Toilet, with oil on canvas. The painting has this somber, almost primordial feel, with its dark palette and enigmatic forms. I imagine Jankowski layering the paint, scraping it back, and then adding more, searching for that perfect balance between representation and abstraction. Those vertical marks, like pale, spectral combs suspended above a dark pool—were they intentional from the start, or did they emerge through a process of trial and error, accident and intuition? It's like he's conjuring a scene from memory, something fleeting and half-forgotten. Maybe he woke up one day and thought, "I have to get this out of my head, onto the canvas." It's a lonely place, this painting. A quiet meditation on the start of a new day and the rituals we perform in solitude. When you make a painting you go into a similar place, alone in the studio trying to figure something out... It makes me think about other painters—Morandi, maybe—obsessively revisiting the same motifs, searching for something in the repetition.