Janas studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, under Prof. Jerzy Tchórzewski. He is associated with the Warsaw-based Foksal Gallery Foundation, the Bortolami Gallery in New York, and Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch in Berlin. He lives and works in Warsaw.
Janas's painting is often described as representing the “traditional approach.” Art critics point to the classical link between his work and the surrealist current, at the same time highlighting the influence of his master – Jerzy Tchórzewski. Stach Szabłowski even wrote:
If Janas' works were not signed, he could easily be taken for a forgotten surrealist from 1940s, one of those dark visionaries who abandoned the realm of figurative representations and immersed themselves in the abyss of the imagination.
Jakub Banasiak identified Janas as the precursor of the young Polish neo-surrealists, whom he referred to as “tired of reality,” thus bracketing artists such as Jakub Julian Ziółkowski and Tomek Kowalski.
Janas first emerged on the art scene when he took part in the 2001 exhibition Zawody malarskie (Painters' Competition), curated by Adam Szymczyk in Bielsko-Biała. Only two years later, Francesco Bonami presented his works at the Venice Biennale. The painter also started cooperating with Western galleries. From the very beginning, his canvases have been notorious for their oscillation between abstraction and figuration. Adam Szymczyk wrote:
These ostentatiously non-representational compositions with traces of figuration have irritated many. They are perfect in their panache towards the expectations of the cultural audience – one rarely comes across paintings that can offend the taste of the viewers so flawlessly and leave them completely clueless as to the source of this distaste.
A pristinely white painting support is the meeting area of mechanical forms (sharply formed, resembling machines, and “piercing” the canvas surface) with amorphous ones (organic, amoeba-like, “fluid,” bodily). This contrast is also reflected in the colour combinations: reds and pinks, reminiscent of the living world, as well as dark and grimy shades – associated with death and sin. As Szymczyk wrote:
There is no narrative or formal unity. The three-dimensional objects are transformed into flat, organic fragments, connected with diagrams, the dirt and splashes neighbour the immaculately painted surfaces.
The difficulty of verbally describing or interpreting Janas' paintings has also always been an issue.