Janusz Lewandowski „Painting”

Janusz Lewandowski „Painting”
December 9, 2021 –  January 29, 2022.

Janusz Lewandowski’s abstractions

Janusz Lewandowski’s art originates in several traditions. The older one refers to the landscape and how it was painted by post-impressionists, the younger one uses gesture painting and abstract expressionism. Both paths meet in the artist’s latest works, although one of the paths of movement is more visible, while the other one remains hidden below layers of black and white.

The cycle consists of canvases of considerable dimensions, the sides of which are measured in meters. This seemingly trivial remark becomes meaningful when we see the painter at work. Janusz Lewandowski stands at the frame-platform and applies paint to the stretched canvas with a wide brush or usually with a simple piece of cardboard. The forms that arise in this way “live“ in a kind of incompletion. This premise should not lead one to draw too far-reaching conclusions about the spontaneity of this act of creation. On the contrary. The picture’s construction is preceded by many fittings in the form of small sketches (the sheets placed next to each other could cover the walls and floor of the studio like a wallpaper). These drawing and painting notes, created in just a dozen or so seconds, resemble a white screen on which black forms suddenly appear. The association with graphics or calligraphic ideograms is quickly verified by the finished images. On their surface, the black spots lose the strength as signs in favor of compositions taken from a different order. Rough, uneven, painted over or merely translucent layers of paint build abstractions. Most of them take place in black and white, whose sharp contrast is broken up by grays. Against this background, saturated yellows, cobalts and blues play with an equally fast, decisive gesture. If the paint reveals the underpainting, so much the better. Because the subject of these works – if it can be indicated at all – is the matter/element of painting itself.

Janusz Lewandowski, Bez tytułu, 2021, olej na płótnie, 122×184 cm.

Janusz Lewandowski eagerly refers to Franz Kline (1910-1962), an American abstractionist whose trademark is expression. Black on white, with time also intense colors, exploded on his canvases with new sounds. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Kline’s work was created in space-time, the rhythm of which was determined by multi-chord structures of jazz. The spontaneity seen in the artist’s works was created in the same way as music – by developing and applying (painting) motifs. Contrary to the final effect, Kline derived them from an in-depth study of real shapes. Despite multiple transformations (repainting), its form, like a jazz chord, did not lose its clarity. 

Janusz Lewandowski’s paintings are also created to the rhythms of jazz he listens to (during my visit to Komeda’s “Crazy Girl“ studio) and are also multi-layered. When carefully watched, they reveal their “subdermal“ codes and transformations. Which came first: black or white color, which was applied with passion?  A few decades earlier, the painter was involved in artistic recycling. From old student works (Lewandowski had already brought up several generations of adepts of art), he created his own compositions – by painting over them with white. Although at that time he still had Władysław Strzemiński’s unism in his mind, which consequently led him to almost one-color surfaces with a rough texture, years later those searches will turn out to be important. They were embedded in the artist’s memory as a strong experience. They can be described as follows: the mark left by painting over is what counts. With time, monochrome compositions will also return to the canvases.

The road to this stage in creativity led through color. Generally speaking, Janusz Lewandowski’s art has so far been associated with the synthesis of nature’s forms rendered with a multi-colored, luminous palette. The structure of these landscapes reveals a good recognition of the tradition of realistic and modernist painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the technique developed over the years now allows the artist to reach for much larger canvases. Now the background and theme, plans and spots, form and drawing as well as light and its lack build abstract landscapes, and their restless textures act like color – they shimmer. However, the mood definitely changes.
Janusz Lewandowski’s new paintings bring melancholy and anxiety (especially the cycle within the cycle, i.e. compositions with geometric figures).

We still have to pause at the canvases themselves. The works are made on tablecloths, covers, pieces recovered from “something.“ First, the material is unfastened on a board (frame), and only after the painting is finished, it is transferred to a hand-made loom. Painting directly on the stretcher could end in a disaster. The pressure of the tools used with force is too excessive. The painter talks with excitement about the “birthright“ of the canvases, as if there was already a beginning in them, which he desperately wants to see, bring out or return to. That is why sketches are so important, it is constantly renewed work on the thought and hand that allows such returns. 

Anna Tabaka

Janusz Lewandowski, born in 1958 in Kalisz. He studied at the Institute of Artistic Education
in Częstochowa, where in 1985 he received a diploma in sculpture from associate professor
Tadeusz Wencel. He deals with drawing and painting. He is a teacher at the Youth Cultural Center in Kalisz, where he runs a drawing and painting studio. Author of individual exhibitions, he also
participated in many group exhibitions. His works are in private Polish and foreign collections.

EXHIBITION DURATION: December 9, 2021 –  January 29, 2022.

OPENING: Dec 9, 2021  7 P.M.-10 P.M.

on the website https://www.facebook.com/GaleriaKalisz/

ORGANIZER:
The Jan Tarasin Art Gallery in Kalisz

CULTURE INSTITUTION OF KALISZ

GALLERY PARTNERS:
Ergo Hestia, Polifarb Kalisz S.A., M&P Alkohole i wina świata

MEDIA PATRONAGE:
Radio Centrum, Calisia.pl, Ziemia Kaliska.