Juiciness of the everyday. Framing the paintings of Wilhelm Sasnal

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Wilhelm Sasnal

By Dominic Eichler, Andrzej Przywara and Jörg Heiser

Sasnal was born in Tarnów, Poland in 1972. He is a prolific Central European artist, considered one of those most acclaimed in the 21st century, often labelled as ‘a young Polish painter’. The Vincent Van Gogh Prize, which he was awarded in 2006, was a springboard for his international career. He investigates a whole range of themes in his paintings, films, drawings and comic strips. This book offers a great insight into sources of his inspirations and fields of interest: painting about painting, figurative painting and portraits, the history of Poland and travel shots. 

The authors take the reader on a journey through Sasnal’s works, which embrace the concept of representation as a matter for reconsideration in the uneasy contemporary image-based culture, resonating with economic, social or political contexts. The journey begins and ends with an interview with Sasnal. In between, essays explore his upbringing, education in the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, the evolution of his style, the collaboration with the group ‘Ładnie’ (which directly translates as ‘pretty’ but which quickly repeated means ‘disorder’) and his emergence as an internationally recognized artist. This is followed with a text on a series of paintings, ‘Maus’ (2001), inspired by Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel of the same title. Interestingly, the book also includes some of Sasnal’s screenplays for his films and the short story Poison (1962) by Tadeusz Różewicz, selected by the artist.

The book itself is a journey full of facts and intriguing perspectives on materiality and subject matter of Sasnal’s paintings and his way of deconstructing the different symptoms of current times. Looking at the paintings embedded in the book feels like holding a kaleidoscope. Images change quickly, such as their subject matter. A man’s belly; a boy in sunlight; a woman on a beach; graphic black and white fence and bunk beds; a landscape with fieldworkers who are overwhelmed and nearly crashed by an unnatural green sky; or an upside-down melting geometric church.

Images are dispersed and replaced by new depictions, hyperreal, Pop-like, abstract or minimal, of something else. They might be seen as simple representations of everyday reality, where each subject is equally important. It is, in a way. At the same time, however, some of the images portray, in the same distanced way, cultural symbols and kinds of ‘forbidden’ memorabilia, such as a portrait of Hitler. Particularly poignant is Sasnal’s depiction of the swastika floating over the land with one arm shaped as a penis and touching the ground (Untitled, 2010). The artist consciously draws the swastika in order to discredit it, convey the message of how lame, impotent and, as the artist says, ‘how dickheaded it is’. At the same time, Sasnal perversely paints a picturesque Wawel Castle in Cracow, even though, as he admits, ‘it is not cool to paint things like this nowadays. Nobody in their right mind would paint such things […] It’s out of line, it’s unpalatable.’

Sasnal says, ‘I am also looking for a pretext to paint a picture’. He is constantly exploring, playing with the ways of seeing and using conventions. He questions how to go beyond representation. He asks how to represent the unrepresentable, as, for example, the cruelty of concentration camps or ‘untold’ stories such as that of the Jedwabne pogrom in Poland in 1941. How, at the same time, to portray such banal subjects as power cords or dripping pipes from his studio? Sasnal is testing the limits of representation. He seems to deconstruct it and put together again in the borderless surface of the canvas, where abstraction and depiction merge. He is portraying hyperreal situations and objects, and at the same time masking and perverting social, political and historical reality.

It is interesting and encouraging to see that there are still artists who in the era of multimedia, digitization and virtualization use the very traditional technique of painting to explore questions of representation. The texture and materiality of paint can still be a powerful tool for subverting meanings not only through the choice of subject matter but also through the juiciness of paint itself and its edginess. It seems Sasnal is mixing genres, playing with peripheries, adding painting to film with a hint of graphic illustration, like an alchemist trying to transform the mundane into something special. His paintings function as battlefields of representations. As Przywara says, ‘Painting changes our way of seeing the world.’

This book, in the Phaidon series ‘Contemporary Artists’, accompanied Wilhelm Sasnal’s exhibition held in 2011/2012 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. It is jam-packed with fascinating personal stories and facts from the artist’s life. It also provides an insightful view of historical and contemporary perspectives on painting in pre- and post-Iron Curtain Poland. The juiciness and meatiness of Sasnal’s works is successfully explored with reference to historical lineage, which is timely and culturally valuable.

Wilhelm Sasnal by Dominic Eichler, Andrzej Przywara and Jörg Heiser is published by Phaidon Press 2011. 160 pp., 180 col. Illus. ISBN 9780714860794