letter to Mr Rumi 2022

Lech Jankowski made this small painting called 'Letter to Mr Rumi', and it's just about the size of a piece of paper. Jankowski has built up the surface with lots of layers, and it makes me think about the way that artmaking is a process of accumulation, one mark on top of another. This way of layering creates a kind of tension or ambiguity about the image. The gray section looks a bit like a landscape. And there’s this sort of purple, cave-like form above, which has some wild orange marks. Look at the way the gray paint has been applied in layers, almost like sediment, while the purple section is worked in a completely different way, with lots of short, broken strokes. It’s like two different paintings butted up against each other. This makes me think of an artist like Forrest Bess who was making abstract paintings in the mid-20th century, which had a similar kind of strange, personal symbolism, mixing abstraction with a sense of hidden meaning. In both cases, the paintings invite you to dream.