Lento sfumato 2020

Curator: Lech Jankowski created "Lento sfumato" in 2020, employing mixed media on what appears to be a textured surface. The palette is muted, dominated by grays, blues, and a hint of violet. What strikes you first about this piece? Editor: The texture, definitely. The image evokes a feeling of containment or confinement. It is like gazing into a darkened room. Curator: I find the composition especially interesting. The rows of… are those combs? …set against the abstract background bring up questions of order imposed onto chaos, the way we attempt to categorize and structure an uncontrollable world. How might this reflect a specific social or cultural context? Editor: Those repeated comb shapes are fascinating; they are like stylized architectural renderings and bring to my mind musical notation, particularly of a meditative, perhaps even melancholic quality. Sfumato—the title gives it away, too. It's Italian for "smoky," so there is that connotation. Curator: Sfumato in painting often relates to softening the transition between colors, creating haziness… perhaps linked with ideas of obfuscation or things being not quite what they seem. I am thinking here about power structures, and how the control over meaning influences social hierarchies. Editor: Interesting. My focus gravitates more to what the objects signify on a deeper level. Combs evoke ideas of grooming, but also sifting, arranging, separating, suggesting layers of memory or experience being processed or distilled. It might speak to finding order or meaning within that experience. Curator: In that sense, the visual language of abstract expressionism and matter painting employed by Jankowski here provides space to analyze individual experience while it invites engagement with broader questions of the human condition under postmodernism, especially relating to a crisis of meaning-making and interpretation. Editor: Ultimately, I see a space ripe with possibilities, as if offering keys to forgotten codes; whether cultural or intensely personal, and each mark speaks subtly, resisting one easy answer or reading. Curator: An excellent point. The deliberate ambiguity challenges the idea of singular truth. Editor: Exactly, I'm left pondering its multiple valences long after the initial impression. Curator: Well, it seems this artwork sparks both political consideration and contemplation about symbols from our respective viewpoints.