Aspiring artist

“I’m like SpongeBob, the absorbent sponge!”

With his paintings, Fabian Jankoschek expresses what he otherwise lacks the words for. After graduating in a year's time, he wants to be able to live exclusively from his painting.(Bild: zVg)

At weekends, Fabian Jankoschek creates other worlds in his studio in Eisenstadt. How and why? The portrait of a fantastic realist.

"If I hadn't suffered a serious foot fracture while skating years ago and hadn't felt during the one-year break from sport prescribed by a doctor that I needed a new passion in my life that I was passionate about and could keep me going in my dreary everyday life, I would probably never have got into painting," says Fabian Jankoschek from Schattendorf. The 29-year-old has been studying abstract painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna for five years and also works as an art dealer for several galleries. On April 6 (from 6 p.m.), he will be presenting his first exhibition at the Schuhmühle in his home town.

The complete show presents 15 exhibits from his work to date, including prints, drawings and paintings, all of which depict fantastic realities. But how do they come about?

When new universes emerge from moments
"First of all, I collect everything that I pick up in everyday life and find exciting, funny or touching. These can be reference images from encounters and observations, movie screenshots and video snippets. My feelings, moods, scraps of thoughts, dreams and fantasies also flow into it," says the artist and talks about his huge archive in which he stores these impressions.

Based on these impressions, he makes sketches and then randomly assembles subjects from his collection to create new realities. "These realities are always there. They just don't get enough time and space because we often don't notice them in our hectic everyday lives," explains Jankoschek.

His muse is the musician BILLI MPEG: "We hit it off when I got her a tattoo a year ago. We've been a couple ever since." Even though the two live separately, he can imagine marrying her.(Bild: zVg)

Being alone as a creative source
Instead of thinking rationally about what he wants to express, he invariably follows his intuition when painting and surrenders to what flows out of him. Even the first brushstroke is completely unintentional. He himself only acts as a "tool" and is often surprised by the result at the end of his creation, he says.

Incidentally, he is particularly creative at night: "To get myself in a happy mood, I don't need alcohol or other substances, just me alone. Then I listen to hip hop and get going. The melancholy only comes when I've painted myself dry and leave the studio in the morning."