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拍品專文
Wilhelm Sasnal, a rising star from the formerly communist Europe, makes art that is at once curiously personal and cooly detached. Painting pictures of the images nearest at hand to him (often newspaper photographs, comic books, and album covers), the breadth of his subject matter is as vast as the sea of reproduced images that make up our visual culture. These varied points of departure are then rendered in his trademark 'everystyle'-- a loosely illustrational short hand of blacks, whites, and cold blue-greys. With this democratic treatment he gives a passive, even-handedness to a stock of images whose ambiguous content ranges from heavy to light, from loaded to unloaded.
"The world in these paintings is that of an attentive and absent-minded observer of sensory reality, with occassional strands of irony, understatement, falsehood and madness running through it. It is a world cursorily catalogued and recorded in synthetic forms, outlined and named idiosyncratically yet with the use of commonplace vocabulary, quotes from the media, song lyrics, outtakes from reality" (A. Szymczyk, "Sludge," Parkett, no. 70, 2004, p. 76).
Airplanes is one of Sasnal's most striking and characteristic images. Over a field of cloudless blue abstraction, eight identical black WWII fighter planes move threateningly toward the viewer, all the while evincing the same passivity with which they are rendered. The bisection of the canvas into two equal squares echoes a strip of celluloid. Likewise, the uniform smoke cloud which emits from each plane adds additional repetition, evoking a commonness and an indifference made possible by mechanical reproduction. Airplanes, full of impending doom, but painted with banality and self-skepticism, demonstrates the recurring conflict over the relationship to the authenticity of images and their content that makes Sanal's work so affecting and influential.
"The world in these paintings is that of an attentive and absent-minded observer of sensory reality, with occassional strands of irony, understatement, falsehood and madness running through it. It is a world cursorily catalogued and recorded in synthetic forms, outlined and named idiosyncratically yet with the use of commonplace vocabulary, quotes from the media, song lyrics, outtakes from reality" (A. Szymczyk, "Sludge," Parkett, no. 70, 2004, p. 76).
Airplanes is one of Sasnal's most striking and characteristic images. Over a field of cloudless blue abstraction, eight identical black WWII fighter planes move threateningly toward the viewer, all the while evincing the same passivity with which they are rendered. The bisection of the canvas into two equal squares echoes a strip of celluloid. Likewise, the uniform smoke cloud which emits from each plane adds additional repetition, evoking a commonness and an indifference made possible by mechanical reproduction. Airplanes, full of impending doom, but painted with banality and self-skepticism, demonstrates the recurring conflict over the relationship to the authenticity of images and their content that makes Sanal's work so affecting and influential.