Windy Room 2018

Lech Jankowski’s small painting, Windy Room, uses oil on canvas. The palette is quite desaturated, various shades of gray really, with the occasional pop of deep red. You can see the process in the way the paint is applied, a kind of intuitive layering, as if the painting has emerged slowly, over time. There's this interesting texture, a sort of all-over grittiness that feels almost like a memory of a surface rather than a depiction of one. Look at the shape in the center, is it a bird? A fish? An airplane? There's a sense of movement implied by the dotted line, but it's unclear whether this is trajectory or just the trace of a former structure. What I like most about this painting is the way it balances abstraction and representation. Jankowski’s work reminds me a little of Anselm Kiefer, though in a much smaller, more intimate scale. Both artists share an interest in texture and layering, creating surfaces that seem to hold within them layers of history and experience. Ultimately, art isn’t about answers, it's about embracing the questions.