Toma Jankowski

Toma Jankowski was born in 1977 in Le Creusot (France). He lives and works in Paris.

A graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Cachan (design department), he continued his studies between 2003 and 2004 at the Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University, where he got a degree in applied arts. He got his Agrégation in 2005.

Between painting and drawing, Toma Jankowski explores the possibilities of the open work of art. Influenced by jazz and improvised music, he creates chaotic shapes and elaborate compositions. His work can be qualified as drawing because of its direct use of retranscription of an intention and as painting because of its use of materials and its format. It was after studying design that he decided to search for ways to explore the possibilities of improvisation through painting. At that moment he was an active collaborator in a collective working with improvisation and was confronted with issues connected to the creative "protocol".

In his search for happy accidents, his works are placed between the representation of a constantly changing world and a requirement belonging to painting seen as a sensitive organism.

"Overall, I am working on a guided improvisation. I often start from an idea for a composition, or from a "plastic fact" or even from a pretext and I try to find a mix that is coherent and heterogeneous at the same time.

My way of painting was very much influenced by jazz players that I have had the chance to meet. They have taught me that the improvised creation is not just letting things go, but rather a perpetual tension between a fixed structure and embracing the moment, the unexpected. All in all, I try to situate myself between the rules and the immediate sensation. I would like to paint without barrier, but in order to be able to do so, I fix myself some points around which i can gravitate. "

- Toma Jankowski