Wilhelm Sasnal

Out of distortion and abstraction come extraordinary moments of clarity in Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal’s first major solo exhibition in the UK. Sasnal seems to withhold what would be the most crucial parts of his paintings, leaving areas of ambiguity from which personal associations and complex meaning can be drawn. Somewhat disconcertingly, the facial features of the subjects in the exhibition’s many portraits have been either smudged or totally removed; and so, without the normal means by which we would read a person, our focus is redistributed to peripherals—for example, hands clutching what seem to be crimson apples, or a bright green backdrop suggesting a fecundity completely absent from the clothes and demeanor of the man in Palestinian, 2008. But the omission of narrative detail is nowhere so striking as in the image that initially seems the most straightforward—a portrait of a beautiful young woman, Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, 2010, who, shockingly, the viewer later learns, was heavily implicated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

For his “Maus” (Mouse) series, 2001, Sasnal takes images from Art Spiegelman’s 1973 comic by the same name, published for the first time in Poland in 2000. Sasnal strips these images of all characters, speech, and color, taking them completely out of context—and yet, it is striking how the few objects that remain in the otherwise bare paintings still retain all of their Holocaust associations. Similarly, the “Metinides Paintings,” 2003, replicate Enrique Metinides’s harrowing photographs of accidents and deaths, but with all of the gruesome narrative information obliterated—leaving only a disturbing atmosphere and a sense of tension that arises from the unseen. Indeed, the beauty of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work in this show lies predominantly in the negative space it creates.