Wilhelm Sasnal
Painter and filmmaker Wilhelm Sasnal comes from the town of Tarnów in southern Poland, to which he returned in 1999 following his studies at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. For a long time, it has been important to him to live in a place that he knows well and where he can feel close to the history that has had such formative significance for him and his generation: life under communism and the encounter with Western liberalism as well as the realization that alongside the systematic extermination of Jews planned and implemented by the Nazis, Polish citizens also committed crimes
against Polish citizens of Jewish origin during the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945 as well as thereafter. In his choice of motifs, Sasnal makes unsystematic associations between personal life circumstances, family, friends, and modern history, modern art, socialist society, the Shoah and anti-Semitism, contemporary pop culture, technological apparatuses – specific moments of a dystopian present. His painting is both stylistically and thematically heterogenous. It escapes randomness, however, by virtue of the role played by artistic subject-formation, the personal character of which is at once emphasized and bracketed. Characteristic of Sasnal’s painting are isolated figures and scenes, frequently taken from mass media, that are divorced from their narrative contexts. In this respect, his depictions are characterized by a lacuna that is less compensated for than it is exacerbated by titles and additional commentaries. In many of his works, he tends to use a limited range of colors that exhibits a significant preference for pallid hues and constellations of black, gray, and white. Other elements of his painterly rhetoric are hard contrasts and extreme shadows, a certain incompleteness in his depictions, exaggerated perspectives, views from far below or high above, and other forms of originally photographic schematization. His painterly practice serves the purpose of embodying precisely the ephemerality that connects his images with the reality that they conjure up. U.L.
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