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Michal Jankowski, Astronaut
VIII, 2011
50x40
cm, oil on
canvas
© the
artist, courtesy ZAK | BRANICKA, Berlin
MICHAL
JANKOWSKI
Astronauts
July 1 –
September 3, 2011
Michal Jankowski is part of the
younger generation of artists, often labelled as “tired of
reality,” the source of whose art is to be found not in the
surrounding reality, but in the imagination, dreams, or
hallucinations.
Jankowski is following the path of surrealism in
full consciousness of the decades and movements that have
passed. His latest series, Astronauts (2011), is inspired by
the work of two classics of experimental filmmaking from the
turn of the 1950s/60s – Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica –
who are regarded as pioneers and precursors of the world
surrealism scene in the cinema of the absurd. This avant-garde
arts duo was inspired, in turn, by the French avant-garde of
the 1920s, chiefly by the surrealists and the dadaists.
“The films of Borowczyk and Lenica are my point of
departure, my starting point ... I try to submit to that
remarkable atmosphere of horror, grotesque, and absurdity I
found in them, and which is very close to my own
sensibility”, says Jankowski. For him, the animation of
the 1950s is not only a visual goldmine of motifs and "retro"
aesthetics (his pictures draw such motifs from Lenica and
Borowczyk as a man in a bowler hat, and a woman with a
flower-face), but above all it is an ironic commentary on the
conditio humana. Under the thin layer of black humor
and horror are existential themes culled from Franz Kafka or
Eugène Ionesco. This is not Jankowski’s first allusion to the
cinema in his work: his earlier series of works drew from
Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and Kaspar Hauser.
They all can be read as metaphors of human fate.
Jankowski is building a family tree for his
painterly philosophy, and in reaching back to the 1950s/60s
and – indirectly – to the 1920s, he is exploring what is left
of past revolutions in art. “The films of Lenica and
Borowczyk, such as “Astronauts,” “The House,” or “School,”
broke the mold, they were original, innovative, pioneering –
they discovered new worlds. The two filmmakers can be
considered as heroes, explorers, and fearless
conquerors,” Jankowski states. This accounts for the
exhibition’s title – ASTRONAUTS – presented at ZAK | BRANICKA
gallery.
The
subject of his work is often the isolation, rebellion and
negation that accompanies every birth of the new. Can today’s
artist be so cheerfully innovative, so painlessly adventurous?
It seems unlikely, because the consciousness or knowledge of
the viewer is as much a burden as the consciousness of the
artist. When every glance at a painting by Jankowski casts a
shadow of Philip Guston, Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon,
nothing remains but a conscious game of hopscotch with art
history.
This
sad recognition that everything has already been done thus
leads to instinctive selfdestruction, and to the destruction
of the components of the picture. The beautiful figures and
objects in Jankowski’s work, painted almost Dutch-style,
disintegrate into individual atoms, or something recalling a
magic, cosmic dust – just to be reborn like a Phoenix from the
ashes.
ZAK | BRANICKA
Lindenstr. 35
D -
10969 Berlin
Germany
T: +49
30 61107375
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