09 Mar 2015

Piotr Janas at Gdańsk City Gallery

During one of our conversations, Piotr Janas said that his paintings were painted 'in a serious key'. Featured in the exhibition 'the latest works', his most recent cycle of paintings follows this approach in a distinctly 'chilly' direction. The 'serious key' acquires existential undertones through the fact that the artist's investigations never cease – Janas makes sure his approach does not dry out on canvas.

The artist's previous works featured intense dynamics culminating in a focal moment, a point of tension or conflict. Forms that tried to dominate the background appeared alongside shapeless entities; colours neighboured monochrome vision. Everything seemed clear, fleshy, sensual, almost sexual – with billows in the centre bursting below the surface. Intensity combined with a manic search for shapes in the substance of the paints. During that stage, the so-called 'oil on canvas phase', Janas struggled with matter; the artist's goal was to spark 'workshop catastrophes', as he calls them, such as cracking paint or yellowish white, etc. The majority of his austere compositions required direct contact, a visual counterstroke; they resulted from individualised powerful gestures that fixed the works in the present.

The 'latest works' cycle marks a radical change since the artist builds a distance. Janas resigns from his struggle with substance – he wants to manage composition. Hence, 'the latest works' are free from the artist's characteristic fever, frivolous light-heartedness and punk-flavoured 'pink fun' that teeter between fine taste, disgrace, naivety and cruelty. Janas wants to paint in an artificial way. The purity of the colour and the clear outlines of forms are a matter of the past. A shapeless patch grows and bursts out of the canvas; thus, it becomes a so-called tapisserie – a greyish black spilling shapeless mass. Individual elements of its microstructures can fill an entire painting and the specific parts are stretched in time over the entire surface of the canvas. Welcome to the era of 'zombie formalism'. The entire tension hides below the layer of paint. Everything happens underneath, out of sight. The painting becomes an object with an untold story of its own. It is no longer a metaphor of the materiality of life, as it used to be in the past when the artist regarded a greasy stain of oil paint as a metonymic representation of human fate.

The smell of chlorinated rubber paint, which has replaced the smell of linseed oil, allowed the artist to release himself from the burdensome oil tradition; from the struggle with the matter and metaphysics of unity in multiplicity. There is no metaphysics; there is no metaphor – there is no struggle. There is only a synthetic pulsating structure that transforms the canvas into the image of the painting.