Reviews
Jacek Jasiniak’s paintings are gaining recognition among experts for their originality and masterful technique. Specialists appreciate the depth of expression and the unique style of his works.
At the first encounter with Jacek Jasiniak’s paintings, visual impressions dominate, and only then do we move to contemplation. Each of us gathered here sees and feels this art differently. One can focus on the formal aspects of the painting—seeing threads, strokes, torn canvas, old boards—or concentrate on the message by delving into the title and then asking oneself what the artist intended…
When engaging with this art, at first we please the eye, then feel curiosity, unease, and analyze our perception of the painting and its subject. We silently ask the Artist why he sees it this way, and either humbly agree with him or, irritated, embark on our own creative process, searching in our minds and thoughts for answers.
Those who know the Artist personally understand that he is authentic in his expression. It doesn’t matter whether the painting has a title or not, what technique or materials were used, or on what surface it was created—the important thing is that it is complete in the viewer’s reception. Looking at the painting, we must see a full message, and that’s it. The Artist has already said everything. That is why Jasiniak’s paintings do not show elegance, delicacy, or ambiguity. Instead, there are contrasts, disturbing color combinations, thick textures, and structures. Tangled threads, worn and torn canvases, burnt, chopped boards. Truth often—and mostly—must be brutal. Jasiniak is painfully honest. Some paintings convey a destructive force. He deeply analyzes reality and his response to it, offering it as a painted image. These paintings reveal what kind of person he is: sensitive, good… not indifferent. But it must come at a cost. Nonconformity and openness to truth must hurt.
These paintings are the synthesis of the Artist’s statement. There are skeptics who see only painted boards or worn canvases; others stand before them enchanted.
The Artist’s artistic guru is Professor Adam Brinken from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Those familiar with the Professor’s painting know that although it is non-representational, it is like the highest degree of initiation. It is like an altar before which nothing more can be said or seen—an altar in a modern dimension and space. Jacek Jasiniak aspires to this. The Artist is spontaneous.
His painting is passion, pleasure, and a process he devotes himself to regularly after work in his learned first profession.
The Artist confided that he dreams of art being his life’s purpose. The creative expression he struggles with daily leads to experiments with materials, color, technique, paint, and symbolism. Sensual experience and surrendering to the creative process matter more than copying reality using traditional painting materials. These alone are not enough to express and convey the problem. That is why, in this painting, both the creative act and the literary message are equally important. Certain ambiguities that abstraction brings to expression work well here. One can focus on painted boards, pierced canvases, paint-stained areas of the painting—and that’s it—or analyze and see much more. But here, each person must make their own analysis.
Therefore, at the end, allow me to quote the thought of the outstanding French artist Maurice Denis about art, often considered a key to contemporary painting theory:
“Remember that a painting—before it becomes a battle horse, an act, or an anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged according to a certain order.”
Wiesława Batko
Ochojno 2022
Jacek Jasiniak belongs to those who, although never abandoning their first profession (he is a recognized specialist in dental surgery), truly fulfills himself only as an artist. As he admits: “Creating art is my path to freedom. My dream is for creativity to become my main occupation in life.” Jasiniak’s example proves that listening to one’s inner needs is necessary and worthwhile. He has been drawing and painting all his life, but following his parents’ advice, he pursued medical studies and specialized—as his mother did—in dentistry. In 2008, he started his own dental practice, yet sidelined painting continued to haunt him. After several years of struggle and already past 40, he found his way to the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, which he completed in 2017 (postgraduate studies) under the guidance of Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk. When asked what motivated this choice, he replied: “During certain psychological workshops, I felt the impulse to return to what was most important to me—painting. Then I began looking for someone who could help me develop. One of my patients told me about postgraduate studies at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, and things took off from there.”
Jasiniak is a passionate painter. He paints a lot and with enthusiasm. He dreams of large-format paintings where he could freely unleash his creative energy. He would likely also take on mural painting (he has even designed murals). He is interested in various painting genres, including stained glass. Boldly, he combines techniques and experiments with painting materials, aiming to achieve effects that captivate viewers and energize them. The artist eagerly shares his work. His exhibition “Encrypted Reality” at the Białoprądnicki Manor Gallery is already his fourth solo show since finishing his painting studies. Jasiniak paints addictively, but in his case, the addiction is beneficial. I use this word metaphorically, without medical connotations. As is known, addiction as a disease leads to the body’s destruction. Jasiniak’s addiction to painting serves development.
The artist’s favorite book is Anthony Robbins’ self-help guide Awaken the Giant Within … and Take Immediate Control of Your Life! Jasiniak’s example shows that the advice of this American entrepreneur and developmental psychology consultant is not overrated. To want means to be able. But this attitude is nothing new. I relate closely to the treatise Affirmation of Life by Krakow pedagogue, psychologist, and art expert Stefan Szuman (1889–1972), who wrote shortly before the war about the importance of seeking life’s joy and affirming its meaning in mature age. One of the three paths to affirming life is “loving purpose and task,” meaning—according to Szuman—“working on developing and realizing our innate abilities, talents, and dispositions, in short striving for the full development of our potential personality.” All this aims for the “blossoming of the soul” and for life to gain meaning.
Jasiniak found his creative path and proved radical in it. Initially, he was drawn to representational, thematic painting, preferably surrealistic. Among his creative patrons, he names Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí, and Zdzisław Beksiński. However, influenced by his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, he significantly broadened and transformed his artistic registers, awareness, and sensitivity. He opened up to twentieth-century avant-garde and abstract painting. I must mention a certain spiteful prejudice existing among painters and critics related to modernism. The dental waiting room was proverbially a place for people with conservative tastes and no artistic refinement. If any paintings hung there, they had to be “light and safe”… Jasiniak took the risk of dialogue with the avant-garde. He rejected proven, traditional aesthetic habits and engaged in broadly understood contemporaneity. Now his patrons include painters like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Gerhard Richter, Christian Hetzel, and Fabienne Verdier. They represent the “hot,” expressionist branch of abstractionism. They demonstrate the possibilities of liberated painterly gesture, operate with the element of form and color, and cooperate with chance. If their creative energy had more influence on reality, we—the viewers—would be more active and freer.
Dynamism is also a constitutive feature of Jasiniak’s work. He confided to me that he spreads his canvases on the floor and enjoys using the dripping technique, introduced in the late 1940s by Jackson Pollock and later adopted by many modern artists. Painters like Tadeusz Kantor, Teresa Rudowicz, and Marian Warzecha photographed themselves in front of canvases laid on the floor. Today, Jasiniak joins them, telling stories of his emotions, thoughts, experiences, and state of mind through playing with painting matter and chance. Is his language convincing? The artist adopts Pollock’s method but achieves original and unique effects. The paint he pours or splashes on the canvas bears traces of his personal gestures and emotions. Looking at Jasiniak’s paintings, I see an insatiable appetite for form and fascination with its possibilities. Painting only on the canvas’s front is not enough for him. He is fascinated by effects achieved by pouring paint on the back of the canvas. Thus, the artist creates double-sided paintings, peculiar tableaux objets, which should be hung in space rather than just on a wall.
“That’s all about me…” We can read this inscription on a small painting based on a barcode found on every product. One bar corresponds to one letter. Jasiniak here refers to the centuries-old tradition of the emblem, emphasizing his belief in the unlimited power of form. His paintings are “internal records,” “new images of man,” demanded, among others, by Tadeusz Kantor during the informel painting period and the great praise of formless art. Kantor’s theoretical texts and manifestos from the late 1950s and 60s could describe Jasiniak’s formal solutions, where I see procedures such as “the movement of an anthill, a nightmarish density, crowding, kneading, (…) throwing a spatula at various angles, streaks like ropes, crushing, flattening, smashing.” Above all, they share a total dedication to art. Kantor believed: “Painting is a manifestation of life. The question ‘why do I paint’ is like asking ‘why do I live?’ To endure in time, to pass through time, to leave a trace of ourselves, our thoughts, our decisions, to note our steps and gestures, our desires, with which we fill time and space around ourselves, around this strange, overly innervated organism, vainly trying to connect with what exists around it. (…) If it is true that the artist burns out in his work, then his work is the ash.” These vital yet dramatic words by Tadeusz Kantor sound like a testament binding every genuine creator. Also, Jacek Jasiniak.
That’s all about him.
Dr Anna Baranowa
Kraków, listopad 2018
When I first saw the paintings of Jacek Jasiniak, a graduate of the postgraduate studies at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, I must admit I was completely and positively surprised…! I expected something different… I assumed that a doctor — a dentist — might lean toward sugary or sentimental watercolor landscapes and after work would play with paints on expensive paper, carefully chosen for the technique. Instead, I saw fully professional paintings, free of amateur flaws, stylistically and expressively referring to the global trend of “matter painting” from the 1960s…
Additionally, I had a chance encounter near the Krakow Gallery and Main Railway Station, where I saw a young, energetic man who, recognizing me, bowed politely and introduced himself. At first glance, I faced a young man of great temperament, reacting spontaneously and naturally. For me, as a longtime educator conducting painting workshops with students, an artist’s personality is inseparable from their works and their unique way of artistically expressing themselves and the world… And here I was struck by an epiphany and relief. I was dealing with a living artistic temperament, so I assumed authentic art should back these predispositions, directly stemming from a person’s spontaneity… I breathed a sigh of relief…
Jacek Jasiniak’s paintings primarily captivate with a certain magic of color and mood, but the dominant expressive tool is their complex structure of painterly matter. The artist not only builds it with varied density of color patches but also treats the painterly structure collage-like, combining specific “objects” such as mesh, wood, or pieces of fabric different from the canvas… The act of painting with colors in Jasiniak’s work seems interwoven with layering, gluing, fixing, and achieving a rich texture of matter with density or transparency of brush-applied color. The artist describes his paintings as using his own technique but often applies mixed media. He enjoys water-based paints, acrylics, and watercolors…
My first impression was a vague association of these often collage-like canvases with the painting of Jonasz Stern, but rather distant, since Jacek Jasiniak works with great liveliness, saturating his paintings with color and often using extreme contrast and decisiveness in arranging planes and main zones of the composition. The element of magic, a magical mystery of colors, certainly holds an attraction and charm for the viewer. It could be described as a kind of secular mysticism, akin to all kinds of magical and ritual ceremonies of various social communities. In this way, colorful packaging in supermarkets or tastefully designed rainbow-gradient medicine boxes in pharmacies also affect the subconscious…
Two paintings particularly caught my attention (from 2019), with speckled abrasions and mysterious indentations across their surfaces, like small craters. I mean the canvas with blue dots resembling raindrops under a perforated mesh fabric, and the painting with dark lace-like areas beneath colorful burlap threads. Jacek Jasiniak skillfully grasps the language of pure abstraction and the advantages of this painterly language. When he tries to introduce the human figure, it immediately falls into the realm of fantasy or youthful surreal comic style. However, in his deeply magical and structural abstraction, he is a serious, expressive, and consistent painter, even revealing some ontological drama of matter, which scientists say is built from conflicting elements, from that unity of opposites…
This clarity and confidence in manipulating matter’s structures, amplified by the magic of color — these are the strong points of Jacek Jasiniak’s painting. The paintings done directly on pieces of old wood also reveal this ontological drama of matter, its tendency toward structural build-up and coherence, but also toward decay and destruction…
I would like to draw attention to the European and global trend in painting, which Jacek Jasiniak more or less consciously refers to in his work. The 20th century, with its courage and breaking of all classical rules, developed, among others, abstractionism, tachism, surrealism, the mentioned matter painting, pop art, hyperrealism, conceptualism, and exceptional works of great giants like Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Perhaps in this text, commenting on the spontaneous and intuitive efforts of a young artist, invoking a certain quote from Pablo Picasso is quite justified. Reflecting on Henri Matisse’s painting, the genius Pablo Picasso said: “He (Matisse) bends all the rules in his painting as much as he can. I destroy those rules!”
Often, creative searching and development brush against the process of destruction and breaking down ready-made and inherited formulas in order to create a new world from the ashes and ruins, new rules and forms of expression. Especially an ambitious artist should work on shaping their own voice and language, originality, strength, and persuasiveness of their expression. Jacek Jasiniak is on exactly such a mysterious path…