For my presentation on a contemporary painter I’ve chosen Wilhelm Sasnal. He was born in Tarnow, Poland in 1972 and graduated from Krakow Academy of Fine Art in 1999. Today he is about 30 years old and has already gained international notoriety in the contemporary art world.
He remains in Poland – living and working in Cracow. This locality seems important to him, since he has drawn inspiration and imagery out of Poland’s political past – such as communism, pre-war modernism, post-war life, and the Holocaust. Sasnal doesn’t completely dismiss this interpretation, as it’s hard to ignore Poland’s past while living there. But at the same time he contests that his work is often misunderstood. Sasnal generally lets people think what they want and states that art isn’t necessarily the best medium for making opinions known.
Sasnal says he’s very western oriented in taste, and uses the internet for source materials – which in turn makes him global. He maintains that his surroundings do not affect his work since he finds sources by “Googling”.
It is said his paintings are a responses to the abundance of imagery in Eastern Europe that emerged after the fall of communism in 1989 - which might be partially true if not combined with the fact the internet was popularized when Sasnal was in art school in the mid to late 90s.
Wilhelm Sasnal is often spoken about in comparisons with Luc Tuymans and to a lesser extent Gerhard Richter. However, he wholeheartedly disagrees about the “Luc Tuyman Effect” attributed to his work. But understandably, he shares with Tuymans a certain visual look, and also Richter’s command of paint materiality.
TECHNICAL ASPECTS
Sasnal finds painting sources from mass media circulated images turning paintings into an interpretative tool. He has a great range of subject matter and methods. But the most reoccurring visual qualities have much to do with lost visual information which is in turn replaced with the “idiosyncratic qualities” of painting. Lost information can be explained in a number a ways, depending on the artwork:
A lot of the time, the loss of information is colour – Sasnal’s achromatic paintings. He has painted butterflies, portraits, figures achromatically – which are all things known for lots of colour.
Sasnal loses information by exploiting the contrast. More subtle tonality between high and low key are cast off.
He also leaves out areas of the painting. A face is smeared or the ground under the figures dissipate into brushstrokes - unfinished as if the painter was interrupted. Other times the compositions are oddly cropped or even nonsensically rearranged.
All this shows Wilhelm Sasnal is treating painting as a reductive process, an economy of information. It’s obvious that he is interested in other analog image making forms, like print, silk screening and especially photography (in regards to black and white and overexposure.) He accepts the filtration of imperfect imaging tools and manipulates it as a new and interesting ways of seeing. Despite running with photographic qualities, brushstrokes are prevalent and at times his paintings dissolve into abstraction. Therefore, on top of it all, he uses the materiality of painting as a visual effect on his subjects. It results in a push-pull effect between representation and paint.
“Images are pared down to their barest essentials and estranged from their original context and meaning.” What’s left is an image far removed from any real scene, person or happening in the past. Considering Sasnal’s sources are pre-existing mass circulated pictures – making the image strange through his decontextualizing process – let’s us rethink the already known. That means he can be spoken about in terms of memory. Memory essentially defined as recreating the past.
Things I’ve related to/found useful about Sasnal’s work
Showing the materiality of paint isn’t a dated look, for example impressionistic, it can be contemporary. Falling short of an image isn’t a bad quality. Things considered flaws in the picture can be used as a visual tool.
More information and detail doesn’t necessarily mean its better. Establishing an economy of visual elements, how much is needed to make its point, it actually gives the audience more to do, it’s more interesting and memorable that way.
Using the internet, or other known imagery, for painting sources isn’t wrong.
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