Leap of Faith

01 October - 19 November 2010

Opening Reception:

Friday, 01 October 2010

                                                                                                                                                 6-9 pm

James Jankowiak  Paintings

Chicago painter James Jankowiak has his background in graffiti, but has moved from the street into the Modernist tradition of abstraction. Embedding himself in Chicago’s museum and gallery scene, Jankowiak draws inspiration from a rich vocabulary of artists. Some of his works build on the tradition of Gene Davis’ 1960s stripe paintings, although Jankowiak is also directly influenced by contemporary artists such as Peter Davies and Erik Parker. His circle paintings echo Kenneth Noland’s but grow organically, bands of color growing in rings like a tree or a geode, like psychedelic targets, or a cross section of a Jawbreaker candy.

Jankowiak’s abstract forms are derived from geological strata, geographic topography, and the layers of sediment through which a paleontologist digs. Jankowiak slowly reveals an image as a paleontologist unearths a fossil from its rock matrix. The work is laborious, workmanlike, and time consuming, but also meditative, functioning as ritual, like a Tibetan or Navajo sand painting. The color of each stripe is individually mixed and applied in multiple thin coats over a white base coat, achieving smooth uniformity, and a brilliance and clarity of color, sometimes incorporating metallic pigments or glitter in their acrylic surface.

Jankowiak’s work questions the legacy of 20th Century formalism, the role of abstraction today, and the function of spirituality in a conceptual context. There are no easy answers to these questions. Jankowiak’s practice, however, can be best understood as a form of spirituality. Painting a stripe can have the meditative function of praying a rosary, spinning a prayer wheel, or walking a labyrinth. It is one of many manifestations of what must be a fundamental human desire to escape our own consciousness and make contact with something, even a secular, rational something, larger than ourselves.

Summarized Catalog Essay by Jeriah Hildwine

September, 2010