JANI, painting, permanent artist of Galerie Capazza since 1993

OFFERINGS

The days are short and the fallen leaves crunch under the footsteps of inconsolable dreamers on their way to rediscover the impossible Time of what was. Today is solitude, sometimes anger, sometimes reason, but most often gratitude for what remains around in Beauty and Poetry, confides Jani in a recent exchange. Her writings resonate with her pictorial work, and Jani remains luminous in her appetite for life, all life, visible and invisible. There is the pain of bereavement, the desert after the departure of a loved one, melancholies that torment the heart. The ever-present inner fire can be measured by the way it glows brightly in the ashes. When the years have passed, what can be said of what has been given? Throughout her books, the impulse of a woman who feels “incredibly lucky to be able to try and understand the ‘why’ of this passage on Earth, where all forms of life are divinely linked”, who later discovers “what she was instinctively looking for: a sense of purpose”, and finally affirms that “painting is for me the precious tool that enables me to remain connected with the worlds, not to lose the sensation of the Sacred”. Today's work condenses all the elements of this quest. It demands a pause. A contemplation. A silence.

BEAUTY                                                                          

We're looking at tondis, a painted work on a round support celebrating the perfection of the circle. Here, three poplar tondis, each 70 cm in diameter, support a work entitled 'Offrandes'. Against a chiaroscuro background, richness and beauty, measure and simplicity. Over the musical scansion of a ternary rhythm, the circle and the square enter into dialogue, the rooted and the moving impose themselves on the eye. The straight line structures, the curve reigns. The first and third tondo are offering tables: bowls filled with fruit, an image of the earth's fertility, work and harvest, have been placed. Cups and decanters are elegant and simple, not ostentatious, aesthetic and functional. Placed in alternating harmony, they seem to whisper in our ears the words of Baudelaire: There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptuousness. A light touches the roundness of apples, plums, pears, figs, cherries and grapes. Hints of yellow, green or violet gleam under its caress. On the outer circle, four rectangles hold a shape painted in gold leaf, a kind of small entity that watches over us, a guardian angel. (Le Palais des Vents, page 15, Feuilles d'Or, page 94 Feuilles d'Or, page 114)

TIME                                                                                                                                                         

This setting inspires respect, perhaps even devotion, and questions the meaning of a ceremonial hidden under the light of a gold-leaf heart lamp, shining in its brightness and dullness. Have we entered a sanctuary, has Jani pushed through a mysterious door uncovering a table of offerings, place of appeasement beyond forgiveness? Is it an offering to the beggar who passes, to the soul of a loved dead person, or to a deity to honour him, to enter into communion? Questioning is nourished by contrasts; these vases and fruit cups have the simplicity of everyday life, but the beauty that emerges from them questions the hands that have arranged them in this way. Who performed this gesture felt like a ritual? Invisible also the recipient of the sending; is it the one who makes silence, to whom complaints murmur, tears flow, prayers rise, the great invisible who suddenly becomes the great Present? This Presence attaches the gaze to a work that exceeds the dimension of time, breaks free from duration, generates spaces.

ATTENTION                                             

Nothing is left out, nothing secondary, a whole world comes to us. The funds are part of that achievement. Out of their darkness appear signs, traces, according to the light. Their straightener discovers arabesques evoking a liquid trembling as to remind that peace and silence are part of movement and agitation. The main thing is always to say, to live: it remains to change position, it remains to give thanks, perhaps to kneel. The life given will be resumed. There remains the time of respect and silence, of the entanglement of the energies of the masculine and feminine. Jani’s artistic journey takes paths where the mind is listening to welcome the unforeseeable sensation, a path where attention in awakening is fundamental value.    

BALANCE and SHARING                                                                                                           

These three tondis give off a stability, a strength. Does the attraction that this triptych exerts come from the central tondo, the well-named “Balance of Sharing”, which pulsates with its undulating lines, a kind of heart of ever-reborn energy, Or does it come from an intuition of the gaze that, sinking into the touches of color and golden meshes, raises a very intimate emotion? Jani will say during an exchange: For years I had been living with fear this 'Offerings' project. And then, suddenly and without hesitation, I dared to materialize a strong sensation, a very old disturbing emotion. In making this triptych, I was both the offering and the sacred concept of gold leaf incarnate as watchman in a lodge at the four meeting points of the two perpendicular lines of the circle. The four 'inhabited' lodges are the link between the three circles. 

GRATITUDE                                                                                                                                           

Be both the object of the gift and the subject who watches, and propose a geometry in space that is also interior space. With a demand faithful to his quest, Jani tirelessly explores this double territory, seeks in a renewed form the resonance of being. Approach to the interiority of the circle, sacred geometry that reveals with elegance and dignity, a sense of struggle and honor. There is a hidden joy, a gleam of secret happiness in the movement of the gift, a gleam of love in the sending towards the other, a light of the gesture that traces a relation to the invisible, builds a base to the impalpable. In the painting of Jani shines a golden point in the heart of the night, mirror of the soul of who contemplates.  «Celestial Cathedral of those who walk, magical link uniting rigor and voluptuousness»

Cypris Kophides

What is there in common between the sand mandala flowing from the deft fingers of a Tibetan monk; the ornate ceilings of Baroque and Seville churches, the Spanish synagogue in Prague, the mosque in Isfahan or Hindu temples; and the hands, feet and voices of flamenco, Sufi or Kathak singers and dancers?

These are forms of incantation, of elevation; the materialization of a human quest that crosses eras, cultures and continents...

Jani's work embodies this quest, the journey we make within ourselves throughout our lives, oscillating between desires, doubts, fleeting certainties, hopes, meditations, appeasements and angers.

When the pen touches the paper,” she told me one day, ”the void is created. It's nothing more than a point of ink criss-crossing the relief of handmade paper, which also bears the marks of the hand. She becomes this little golden marble, rolling from hollow to mountain, leaving behind a trace of light that will be offered to the view of others, as an invitation to follow her on this inner journey. Jani's work is an act of meditation. The spirit IS in the hand as it traces, without a net, this geometric and poetic cartography.

Jani shares her light with us, the fruit of her quest for freedom.
Almost a century on this earth! And still in search of freedom...
The granddaughter of a beloved gypsy grandmother and a young girl with a passion for painting, Jani left her family at an early age, a family that thwarted her nascent desire to embrace the world. Married four times until she met the real Blackbird, Felipe, Jani has always lived as a free woman, even if it meant paying the price of her independence.
Perhaps in a future life she'll stay in Daramsala, making tankas and mandalas, as the Dalai Lama suggested at the time? In those days, she still had too much of a “taste for earrings”, as she so aptly put it, with her mischievous eyes and that devastating smile...
In the meantime, she paints, relentlessly, like a tightrope walker weaving the thread on which he advances as he goes along... she continues to grow, and to make us grow with her.

One of the latest triptychs created for the exhibition is entitled Offrandes. To what secret being is this graphic prayer addressed? To loved ones too soon gone? To the heavens, with all their mystery? To the viewer, who will be lucky enough to contemplate this work?
Yes, to be an artist is to make offerings. To offer, through your work, a moment of emotion, a breath of fresh air. Putting yourself in a state of receptivity is like pressing the pause button on the soundtrack of the world's noises, those that invade our hearts and minds, to open a breach and let in a resplendent silence.

To enter Jani's universe is to plunge into oneself. To take the time to lose yourself between the lines, the better to find your way back. To stop, intrigued by a word or a symbolic engraving in the gold leaf... to step aside, to discover how the light makes the work sing differently depending on the angle of view, revealing the colors of the pastels that adjoin the gold lines. Understand - feel - that the work exists first and foremost by the hand of the person who makes it, but at the precise moment, thanks to the way we look at it.
The work exists for and through oneself, now.

This exhibition, entitled Ahimsa, brings together the artist's recent works, created specifically for. They are the materialization of months of work and a lifetime of reflection.

Thank you, Jani, for sharing your light with us. Thanks to you, we feel less alone in the night.

Laura Capazza-Durand
One day of May 2025
Above the clouds between Seville and Nançay

“The mandala in pictorial art is a pair that has never grown old, because it has been renewed in every era, even in the face of the prevailing winds; it has made itself available to painters and visual artists of all kinds. Our friend Jani is a prime example of this in the microcosmos or brotherhood of art lovers who have been exhibiting in avant-garde galleries for decades.
For Jani, the mandala is at the apogee of her style as a painter; for Jani, as a writer, the mandala has its place as a literary image, with its poetic relief on every page, if not every sentence.
The artist discovered in India what she already had within her, ever since she took up painting to fulfill her need for creativity. All is well in the sky of the mandalas painted by our friend, who is having the time of her life in front of her unfinished works and those already on the exhibition circuit and art markets, where the public returns a sign of appreciation when not a letter of admiration, but the friend remains lucid in accepting the praise given from the bottom of her heart by a searching mind, for not being a recent arrival, experience has taught her to listen to any commentary, without drawing glory from it.

Claude Haza Nice September 30, 2023

“The painter Jani once said to me: 'Gold is not a color like any other, because it's not a color. It's a state. An observation. A stage.”

“The ultimate without doubt, but which sometimes anticipates, outcrops, skims, comes to bear witness to a light in the night, to living matter and its messages. Messages because it's a dialogue with matter, and it's this alchemical frequentation that Bachelard calls reverie. A cosmic reverie. As if the alchemist, the painter, emerging from language, let himself go and play the great aeolian harp, in order to cradle what Reeves calls cosmic gestation.”

France Delville, Extract from a text about gold

“A culture results in a desire to go deeper and, if you're a creator, a desire to identify with spiritual antecedents. Romanesque cloisters and temples generate motets and mandalas. Appreciating the delicate metrics of du Bellay or listening to the dodecaphonists are just as much a part of our wealth and mental freedom. This substratum, in all its diversity, is indispensable to any forward-looking approach. Culture cannot be differentiated; it forms a whole. Would a work be possible without culture ? So JANI's painting plunges me into a spirituality inherent in culture... ”

Michel Gaudet

“Stripped down to their essentials, Jani's Palatine Memoirs are icons, abstract representations of the divine in which the invisible suddenly becomes the obvious”.

Dane Mac Dowell

“As usual, Jani’s tools aim at transcending the material; a thin paste of colors and tones, kneaded ad nauseam, until the ingredients become fluids, until they only let ooze the juice of their substance. That is to say, in Jani’s work, so as Chagall’s, chemistry becomes effective alchemy.
Colors are unified in a path of equal lights, harmoniously distributed on the surface of the canvas. The painting becomes the mirror of a timeless contemplation.
The strong architectural geometric body of the shapes shaded off to merge with the proliferating richness of the colors which slowly lost their practical function - without loosing anything of their symbolism- to fully assume the role of cultural seed, of shapes tune.
Each painting of Jani would be an invitation to meditate on several ways of thinking from very ancient civilizations - which are, or are becoming again, operating in our occidental cultures directions, weakened by tragedies and wars as other civilisations, cruelty between men and men, nature and animals.
Besides we go towards a better knowledge of the celestial mechanisms, besides we understand better the universe and the more distant galaxies, I think we lost the sacred sense of cosmos and the hidden meaning of some connections.
The initiatory quest that Jani offers will help us to find again this sacred sense. Her persistent cult path in her pictorial formation is fulfilling, together with Science, the works that intent to question what we believe to be the set fate of destiny, the irreparable”.
André Verdet

Since 1967, many exhibitions in France and abroad.