Jan Dobkowski rejected textural solutions stemming from post-impressionism while he was still studying. He eliminated the painterly space from the painting, filling the surface of the canvas with large flat fields of lightly applied colour. He limited the colour range to two contrasting complementary colours — red and green — which he considered to be the colours of life. The line outlining the shapes flows in restless, meandering turns, creating Art Deco-like decorative arrangements. Despite deformation and exaggeration of forms, the paintings are subjective rather than abstract. The repertoire of repeating motifs includes, among others, multiplied breasts with heavily marked nipples, heads with strands of hair resembling flames, human skeletons, hearts, sperm, and embryonic shapes. The human form is not superior to other elements of the compositions — all the organisms remain equal and mutually entangled. The hierarchical division into the human and the non-human is abolished. Arrangements of soft shapes express symbolic content: an elemental wonder of life and a sense of oneness with nature constantly undergoing change. In the mid-1970s, the human figure vanished from Dobkowski’s paintings, leaving only a dynamic line, flowing through the space in waves or in soft, irregular arcs. That is when the artist began creating ink drawings, filled with swirling lines, as if endowed with a life of their own.

In the case of the work Attempted Contact, two broad bands are gently wavy and get close to each other. In these drawings, Dobkowski abandoned anecdote, focusing on building atmosphere. Art historian and critic Wiesława Wierzchowska wrote that the artist ‘gives shape to mental states, experiences that took place contrary to nature’. She also wrote that the rhythm of the pulsating lines is ‘the rhythm of the record of the physical process of drawing, unique like handwriting, and like handwriting, revealing the human personality’. Saturated with lyricism, the works reveal the artist’s individual sensitivity.

Ewa Skolimowska, translated by Paulina Bożek