tab ur et nr 3 2022

Curator: Lech Jankowski created “tab ur et nr 3” in 2022, a compelling mixed-media piece employing both watercolor and impasto techniques. What are your initial thoughts on this artwork? Editor: It has a strange, unsettling feel. The impasto gives the surface a rough, almost decaying quality. The color palette reinforces this mood; I’m seeing rusts, grays, and muted browns. It looks like the inside of a decaying structure. Curator: I think that reading resonates, especially given contemporary dialogues about urban decay and institutional abandonment. This image perhaps subtly invokes the decline of physical infrastructure and the societal anxieties that emerge with such conditions. The mixed media aspect feels integral; watercolor can symbolize fragility while the impasto layers bring a tactile sense of history and weathering. Editor: I agree about the impact of those specific textures. I'm also wondering how the implied subject – a stool depicted via a kind of architectural perspective drawing placed under what may be a collection of holes indicating missing tiles or possible ‘stars’ above it, impacts its social position. Could this image function as a reference point for individuals marginalized from accessing basic physical commodities and decent infrastructures, such as, shelter, water, and hygiene? Curator: The stool placed in that oddly sterile space – which also reads as confining – might indeed stand for access or the lack thereof. Jankowski positions these basic objects – shelter and furniture – inside the abstraction to stimulate broader questions around class, labor, and sustainability in unequal environments. What political stance, I ask myself, does this artwork want to be positioned with? Editor: I hadn’t thought about that aspect of physical enclosure; the composition lends itself to your perspective about sustainability, too. Now I see this work within ongoing discourses relating to resource accessibility and the potential violence imposed upon both persons and their environments due to scarcity. Is the arrangement somehow speaking against these inequalities? Curator: The deliberate tension he creates – the combination of hard geometrical outlines of the depicted stool in dialogue with its organic decay in textures and coloring – encourages viewers like you and I to confront and perhaps destabilize conventional ideas around who profits from resource disparities. I’d be interested in comparing his imagery and approaches with other artists working today under related aesthetic objectives and socio-economic goals. Editor: Seeing its historical and material conditions reframes my perception. What initially felt merely unsettling now feels consciously critical. Curator: Precisely, and art's power resides partly in this ability to constantly resituate our understandings, provoke inquiry, and generate meaningful social discourse.