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.

The painting Voracious Woman shows an animal-human creature with wide-spread arms with splayed fingers. Its head is constructed out of eyes surrounded by a wreath of multiplied breasts. The forms seem to flow one into another, which gives the impression of being frozen in dynamic motion. Arrangements of soft shapes express symbolic content: an elemental wonder of life and a sense of oneness with 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 Pailina Bożek