Nie-bo XXXXIII

The line is an integral part of Jan Dobkowski's work. Initially it was a contour filled with pure, intense colours, in time taking the form of multiplied strokes from which the painter builds the composition. Jan Dobkowski works by creating cycles of canvases. The earlier ones, created by a similar method, include „Carnival in Rio”, „Threnodies”, „Oceans”, „Titanic”. During the exhibition at the aTak gallery in Warsaw, two cycles of the painter's works were presented: „Peculiar Events” and precisely „Nie-bo”, where its authors point to Jan Dobkowski's making of a record akin to daily diary notes, this time in painterly form. This record concerns the change of light, which was emphasised in the golden, shimmering matter of the painting, but also of the surrounding world, the search for a way to maintain a relationship with it and to discover it anew. At the same time the exhibition's title „The Heaven Above Me” brings to mind the sentence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant: There are two things that fill the soul with admiration and reverence, the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. In this context Jan Dobkowski's paintings from the „Nie-bo” cycle also take on a transcendental resonance.