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. 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 colour range is limited to two contrasting complementary colours: red and green. In contrast to this colour scheme, characteristic for the author, the composition Euphoria is multicoloured. The multiplied silhouettes of women flow one into the another, giving the impression of being frozen in an ecstatic dance. They have lush breasts with well-defined nipples and strands of hair that resemble flames. Highly charged with eroticism and sensuality, they carry a symbolic content. They express the joy of life and the fertility of nature constantly undergoing change. The artist himself claimed that for him, nature is ‘. . . a matter of space, a certain consistency of the world — it is earth and air, clouds, fire and water, it is the constant transformation of nature. People long to open their eyes to the sun and sky, to breathe in the scent of the earth. Because it is Nature that gives us the feeling that we exist. I believed that there was a reservoir in naturalness that could make my art alive. That is why, first and foremost, I tried to show humanity in my paintings. Humanity stripped of all attributes of culture or civilisation, woman and man in their age-old gestures. Through eroticism, I wanted to show how strongly humans desire nature and that it is good’.

Ewa Skolimowska, translated by Paulina Bożek