Audiencja 2019

Lech Jankowski summons with graphite and perhaps charcoal this vision of a figure in the darkness, an audience perhaps with their own unconscious. The figure has this air of looking upwards, maybe beseeching the heavens. I wonder if Jankowski was thinking about the absurdity of hierarchies, of how we construct these ladders of power that sometimes lead nowhere. The drawers coming out of their chest feel symbolic, like secrets or desires are on display but remain just out of reach. I can imagine Jankowski in his studio, wrestling with the charcoal, smudging and layering to get that deep, velvety black. Each mark probably felt like a question, a probe into the unknown. It reminds me of Goya's dark paintings, that same sense of unease and the human condition laid bare. Like all artists, Jankowski seems to be in dialogue with the past, wrestling with the same old questions of life, death, and what it all means. Painting is like that, a conversation across time, an artist responding to an artist, and now here we are, responding too.