JOANNA janowicz

The Body Remembers Colour

In Short
A series of oil paintings exploring the body as a site of memory. Through fragments, gestures, and restrained palettes, colour becomes residue — a trace of lived experience held beneath the surface.
On Touch and Afterimage
In The Body Remembers Colour, the human figure does not arrive whole. It emerges in fragments — a resting arm, a turned back, a hand suspended mid-gesture. The body appears as something sensed before it is seen.
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These paintings resist portraiture. They dwell instead in intervals: the breath before touch, the warmth gathered beneath skin, the quiet tension of two presences leaning toward each other without closing the distance.
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Colour is not applied as description but as memory. It seeps, presses, settles — like heat held long after contact. Soft violets, muted pinks, and bruised greys move across the surface as traces of what has passed through the body and remained there.
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In this series, memory is not narrative — it is physical. The body does not store events in sequence; it carries them as weight, as temperature, as subtle shifts of light.
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Each canvas becomes a skin-like surface where experience resurfaces —not as story, but as tone, pulse, and proximity.
Threshold,oil on painting board, 18 x 24 cm, 2025
Available
After resting, something changes,oil on canvas, 18 x 24 cm, 2025
Placed in a private collection
Memory, close-up,oil on canvas, 18 x 24 cm, 2025
Available
A pause, held,oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm, 2025
Available
Missing Touch,oil on canvas, 15 x 15 cm, 2025
Available
Folded into silence,oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm, 2025
Available
Red Fever,oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm, 2025
Available
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