Wilhelm Sasnal Explores the Margins of Los Angeles

Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled, 2024, oil on canvas, 46 x 36 inches
 

By EDWARD WAISNIS March 3, 2025

Polish painter and filmmaker Wilhelm Sasnal has been splitting his time between his native Krakow and Los Angeles of late. Sad Tropics* comprised of paintings that resulted from the artist’s experiences in his time on the West Coast is the focal point of this exhibition. Traversing the LA landscape on a bicycle aided immensly in the creation of the works, given that they focus on the ephemeral that comes into focus only with boots on the ground, so to speak; the alleyway behind a convenience store; an innocuous roadside telephone junction box; the endless freeways.

With an approach promoting spareness, leaning to the minimal,†  afforded by clever observation, and even cleverer execution, at sussing out the angle of detail to bring off imploring radiance with meager means Sasnal melds his skill set to the subject at hand fittingly. The thiness, resulting in shallow space, lends the emblematic imagery catchiness redolent of posters and billboards that fits the content with spot on relevancy.

While social context is forefront, Sasnal turns his back on trafficking. We have yet to see his iconography recycled into daily usage as many contemporary art world luminaries have allowed. Looking at the preponderance of the fashion, advertising–and just downright opportunistic marketers–that have co-opted eye-catching imagery as salable commodity in these days of re-alignment. Sasnal’s louche read on life could only be ‘sold’ in these spheres as voguish transgression to the burgeoning ultra-wealthy.

Sasnal’s stance owes to a linage stemming back to Eastern Bloc cynicism singularly established in the early work of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Harking from a country that was part of the former Soviet regime, Sasnal carries these influences to our new century laced with emanations of mid-twentieth century philosophical and literary attitudes and theories.

Time and time again Sasnal has expressed a deep fondness for music. If pressed to classify the paintings within that field I would say that they would be études. Not in the sense of a minor key, but rather, echoing the vaunted status of peers the likes of Luc Tuymans and Roaul De Keyser with a blast-zone of topicality as well as perceived sincerity in the face of what could be read as a cynicism revealed to be eliminating conceit.

Utilizing classical painting tools and techniques, from gridded mapping to stenciled and ruled passages (that seems to be afoot in painting these days) of adept curtailed plotting is what contributes to Sasnal’s success in bringing the feat of illusion–inherent in his paintings–to fruition.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Two Policemen in Front of Fruit Still Life), 2024, oil on canvas, 16 x 22 inches

A suite of easel-sized canvases, with surfaces a bit more scarred with impasto, line an introductory wall, interrupted by the somewhat larger Untitled (The Kiss), 2024 **, one a rather traditional still life, Untitled (Fruit Still Life 1) reminiscent of George Braques late work; another an expressive duplication of what may be a newspaper image of policemen in the street, Untitled (Two Policemen in Front of Fruit Still Life), 2024, mocking the former and bringing the foreboding of threat of censure of the police state, with lingering visions of riot control all the way to the Rodney King incident, given the setting from which is comes to us.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Rita in Pool), 2024, oil on canvas, 68 x 50 inches

An entire sub-category of Sasnal’s output is dedicated to family portraiture, for lack of a better description, that comes close to the slight eroticism (by using this term I mean to point out the attributable warmth and tease of mystery completely in opposition to any salacious connotation) that is found in a mini-body of work by Richer. I am thinking, particularly, of his Betty of 1977, showing his daughter with head turned away, highlighting the back of her head of lush hair as well as the richly patterned red and white sweater/jacket she had on, and his Lesende of 1994 in which his wife is cropped waist up, in a side view, reading a magazine or newspaper. The exhibition includes one Sasnal that fits this category. Untitled (Rita in Pool) depicts the painters daughter, shown in side view, immersed up to her waist in a swimming pool and hovering at the edge engrossed in her cell phone. Not only does it update the means of media from the Richter, but it mimics the pose. Whereas Richter developed blurring to a high standard, as a biting nod of debt to photography, Sasnal lavishes the stark shadows of full sunlight employed by illustration while, with a bit of a philosophical touch, introducing the waft of disregard for the academic.

Wilhelm Sasnal, “Tristes Tropiques”, 2024, oil and pencil on canvas, 68 x 120 inches

Tristes Tropiques, amongst the largest canvases shown, a high contrast rendering of a banal electrified highway sign on wheels under a smoldering sky, emitting an indecipherable message, is certain to stop traffic. The interstices of bare primed canvas carry both the pencil guided lines laid down and the inflections of paint spotted by the actions of frottage (much like the brass rubbings people can make at Westminster Abbey) the pavement outside the studio.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Wall with Cardboard Boxes), 2024, oil on canvas, 96 x 72 inches

The beauty of the back-alley scene of Untitled (Wall with Cardboard Boxes) quivers in drastic opposition with it’s source. The crumpled cardboard boxes turned into a makeshift shelter exude the containment of their purpose through a few deft passages of paint handling that Sargent (and fans of Sargent) would be proud of, becoming a raw environment of sculpture.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Eric Call Home), 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 54 inches

Bringing us to that junction box. Untitled (Eric Call Home) drills down on the ennui of the Los Angeles landscape by presenting a composition dominated by the bland boxy junction box centered with a peripheral glimpse of the streetscape surrounding it. Emblazoned on this hefty mass is the scrawled plea of presumably one of the lost, or drifted, and/of endangered individuals that have become a mass in the City of Angels.

Verge ††, a term embraced by Sasnal, adequately describes his working methods as well as his inclinations. He revels in a state of suspension, an anxiousness towards completion of the image or to go to a determinate idea (meaning). Worthy of comparison with Peter Doig, Sasnal shows a higher tolerance, indeed an embrace, of the abject, acknowledging the ethereal qualities inherent in painting and life.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (All American Asphalt), 2024, oil and pencil on canvas, 68 x 60 inches

Upon walking out of the gallery, and into the streetscape of midtown Manhattan, I was conscious of the influence Sasnal’s work was having on my own perception of the surroundings. Seeing the exhibition amidst the tony surroundings reduced to a mood of hollow grittiness caused by countless floundering, or shuttered, shops mirrored the desolation row detail of the pictures in the show. Add the aura of a certain tower, owned and operated by an individual who is lording over us all with terrifying power and aggression at the moment, a mere couple of blocks away added to the punch. We need art that speaks with power and confidence to the aspirations of a higher thought and culture. If nothing else, marshaling calling for us to take a look at the world and, by dint, at ourselves, our place within it and our actions in relation to it.

* The title is adapted from Claude Lévy-Strauss’ 1955 book “Triste Tropique”.
† This aspect of Sasnal’s career, which he shares with his wife Anka, impels me towards watching his films with the hopeful estimation that they carry something of Neo-Realists and/or the high modernism of Antonioni.
** All works cited are dated 2024.
†† Sasnal resorts to using the word in interviews available on YouTube.

Wilhelm Sasnal: Sad Tropics
Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street, New York
January 22 – March 6, 2025




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