No subject matter seems too large or controversial for Wilhelm Sasnal to tackle. Here, the Polish painter focuses on historical events and tales from folklore that circumnavigate religious and racial prejudices.
The canvases vary between large abstract views of interiors and op-art landscapes, and more penetrating portraits and narrative driven works. There’s fluidity to the work. Quick gestural brush marks give the sense of freshness, as if they were painted yesterday. His use of muted colours, moody intense black and greys, is offset by unexpectedly abrasive bright hues.
Smaller paintings invite you in, especially the facsimiles of famous artists’ work. On what appears to be an old tablecloth, fruit has been painted in the distinct style of post-impressionist Paul Cézanne. Two rural scenes by none other than English sporting painter George Stubbs have been rendered in moody tones.Yet, Sasnal isn’t revering these eminent figures from art history; often, he’s highlighting social inequalities and cultural discrimination. He reframes Edgar Degas’s ‘At the Stock Exchange’ for example to zoom in on the conversation between two Jewish men and the apparent anti-Semitic subtext of the original.
Sasnal continues to unpick the multifaceted layers of reality in his bright painting based on a Polish children’s poem from the 1920s about an African boy who doesn’t want to take a bath for fear of turning white. He interprets this somewhat questionable tale in a decorative illustrative manner, but never loses sight of the poem’s derogative undertones by including a ghostly white face that looms over the silhouetted figure of the little boy.
What is most striking about these works works is their filmlike quality. They are individual frames that make up the bigger picture of history. Here the past overlaps with the present, albeit in a way slightly altered through Sasnal’s reinterpretations. But isn’t that what we all do, recreate our own reality? Sasnal just makes us more aware of what we might overlook – or choose to forget.
Freire Barnes