Do any of your works have a strong sense of place to them? What are those places? Or are the echos less specific flashes of memories?
I have the sensation of places when I paint but they are not a deliberate subject. Places can appear, as important as the line of a leg, a word, a tree, a series of dots. But if a place exists in my art, it exists as its conversations, scents, faces. Seoul is about density, air, emptiness, not specifically about the city.
My wife is Korean so I have been there a few times and have done some works that evoke the mood of that city. Seoul is a very paradoxal place for me. Most of the time, the city subject is melded with experiences or people I met there. In a way, it’s for me a very specific place but the feeling I had there can influence compositions or colors in another painting. I think a city nowadays is a living thing, especially the huge megapolis and I don’t think you can define it. It changes so quickly and your first experience of a place can be very different from the next time you see it because the city changes, mutates, evolves in to something new. For a Parisian who is used to living in a kind of city-museum where new architectural and urban processes are almost everywhere, it’s fascinating.
What I paint “fixes” memory in a way. As I painted Saint Florentin (Saint Florentin is the city where I grew up in Bourgogne and one of the “ECHO” paintings includes references to it), a sudden memory hit. Quentin. Someone I hadn’t thought about for years. There, in my studio. Perhaps the painting saved something, just a little.
As I paint a memory may occur. Unsummoned. A shape strikes. Once there, it is fixed, in other words, it becomes an aspect I can use over and over, like a new word learnt or an inexperienced letter in my vocabulary. Sometimes, once fixed on paper, this new aspect becomes more real to me than the memory trace it transpired from.
Toma Jankowski – “Eros Rocket” – 120×80
How do you start each of the works—with a specific vision? Or do you begin and let the memories come and guide you?
When I start a painting, it all begins with a patch of color. Not a place. Not a memory.
I have no idea: is it going to be a place or the story of something? In reality the beginning is not important because midway, I always alter everything, I turn the object upside down. It becomes something else… so the first idea, the “patch” moves elsewhere. Yet finally, when the painting is completed, I see the place again. Perhaps the original idea I moved from, starting with a patch of color was a pretext, and has grown into a place.
What obsesses me when I’m painting is certainly not memory as a concept. No nostalgia, no search for childhood, for the past. But I enjoy the fact that memory is a sudden jab. Perhaps, as I paint a form of knowledge occurs.
In a way, my paintings tell me more about my future than about my past.
How do you choose the colorways which seem really important in each piece?
I make my colors myself. I’m perverse about color – obsessed, manic. Each colorway is an intuitive process. Nothing sweet. Nothing halfway. But sensual. Greedy. Dry. Raw.
Toma Jankowski – “Cosmos My Youth” – 120×80
Do the works serve more as an archive to your memories, or a form of therapy as you’re making the works – remembering and interpreting those memories?
Neither. The world is simply more acceptable to me when I paint. The more I paint, the more complex the world becomes. I like that. But I don’t seek to classify.
Is memory a big part of your whole body of work? Or just this series?
When Coltrane plays My Favorite Things, he’s nourished by his past but it’s the moment of playing that counts. Of course my past has a part in my work, but I’m interested in the now of the painting. I can’t reduce any of my work to a memory, a souvenir, a moment. I paint as it happens. My question is how. Not what.
So as viewers of your work, you’re more concerned with how it makes us feel than what it makes us think?
Yes, absolutely! I like when a viewer makes his own journey through the painting. I just try to keep the forms at a certain level of tension. Images, forms and lines have to be polysemic, ambiguous, so an aesthetic perception can be activated. The relationship between various signs is more important than the signs themselves.
Toma Jankowski – “Les yeux grand fermes” – 120×80
Nick Cave says “Memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive are tied up in memory.” What do you think about that?
Nick Cave is ultra cool! I love the cover on Push the Sky Away. I love the girl on the cover! I listen to him when painting. Sometimes I wish I could paint the truth with which he sings. His sincerity is almost dirty.
What kind of truth?
I am not seeking truth, I’m seeking beauty and sensation. I am just very careful to be sincere – it’s a kind of honesty- but this personal point of view can’t be considered a universal truth. For instance, if I’m sincere when I’m painting, I’m usually surprised by what happens. So for me I’m not saying a truth; I’m discovering it by painting.
How did you find the process of stirring up old memories? Are they all still there and do they feel solid? Or like they’ve changed and now it’s your interpretation of them, rather than your hard knowledge of them?
Yes, a memory sometimes stirs me up when painting. Yes, the past can send reminders through a shape, a figure, a patch. Yes, a memory frequently revisits as I paint. That unanticipated memory clusters and gathers depth, becomes a “thing” I recall. A fact, perhaps. Or a physical sensation like a fever, a bruise, an unnamable sensation that belongs to no conscious body – to the time before language. So, in a sense, memory works itself through the paintings, but it is not elected, not summoned, it just is.
Toma Jankowski – “Alt” – 120×80
I’m curious if you can use words to explain your paintings?
I don’t think I can. I have a bad relationship with words and theory of art. I think most of the time the main point of a painting cannot be translated via another medium and translations reduce the information. A color has no meaning, but the viewer can feel its information, even if it’s an underlying meaning.
Or are the paintings the end result of a journey, the journey that it took to make the painting is what the painting is about?
It’s a balance between the painting as an organic body with aesthetic rules and indications that create a field of meaning. To be honest, I don’t really know what I want. I know that I don’t want to be abstract (only colors and lines) and I don’t want to draw illusionist images. So I try to find a way of keeping the different signs in order to allow uncertainty to persist. In this way the viewer has to be active and play with it.
Toma Jankowski was born in 1977 in Le Creusot (France). He lives and works in Paris. After a PhD in Applied Arts at Paris University – Sorbonne, he started teaching art in preparatory classes in 2008. He is represented by galerie Olivier Waltman in Paris and Miami.
The post ECHOS appeared first on Boat magazine.