Plaża 2021

Lech Jankowski made this small painting, called Plaża, using paint on canvas. There’s a muted quality to the colors, mainly grays and whites, that gives it a dreamlike feeling. You get the sense that it's been built up layer by layer, creating a textured surface that feels both rough and delicate. What really grabs me are the small, black marks clustered in the center. They look like birds in flight, maybe, or some kind of abstract figures or symbols. Each mark is distinct, but together they form a kind of swarm, like a murmuration. It makes you wonder about the artist's process, how they built up the image, adding and subtracting, until they arrived at this final composition. The way Jankowski plays with texture and form reminds me a little of Antoni Tàpies, in the sense that he’s creating something that feels both ancient and totally modern. It’s like he's tapped into some primal visual language, and that’s something I find really compelling.