Andrzej Jackowski
At the Lining • 2005 • Etching, an edition of 20
Andrzej Jackowski’s art taps into the subconscious, conveying the vaguely remembered and the rarely confronted, in paintings and drawings of intentionally visceral appeal – making his art so rich as well as restrained, so tangible and yet so tantalisingly hard to define.
“I’m not interested in particular scenes from life or childhood or whatever. It’s an evocation through reverie, a mood of awareness. I use domestic objects like wardrobes and tables and beds, as receptacles of memory, imprints of our bodies and lives and experiences. Rafts, in a sense, we drift on in our life. They give us ballast. That’s how I see them anyway.”
The imagery in Jackowski’s artwork inhabits what would otherwise be an ‘abstract’, quite geometric, painting. Memories do float in and out of our minds. Those moments of reverie which encourage them offer an escape, a freedom, from the rigid demands of existence. Reverie is a solitary solace. “Instead of single beds I decided to put double ones, but they still feel as lonely as before,” he laughs.
