Windy Room 2018

Lech Jankowski's 'Windy Room' feels like it’s been coaxed into existence through layers of muted greys, blacks, and whites. It's a painting that’s been built up, scraped back, and then built up again. I wonder about the artist and what they might have been thinking when they made it. This piece has a kind of haunted, textural feel to it, which speaks to a world of subtle emotions. Look how Jankowski uses thin, dotted lines to trace an imaginary path from the top of the painting to the bottom, meeting a small daub of red paint. It feels like a controlled experiment to me, a kind of back and forth—a process of call and response across the picture plane. The surface is incredibly worked. I think of artists like Antoni Tàpies, who are also interested in texture. What is interesting to me is how Jankowski’s paintings reveal a dedication to the material itself and highlight painting’s potential to communicate feeling. The more paintings I see, the more I feel like artists are having a constant conversation through time.