WILHELMSASNAL(b. 1972)Untitled (Czeczenia).Signed and dated " 2000" on the overlap of each panel. Oil on canvas.Larger panel 27 ⅝ x 31 ½ in. (70.2 x 80 cm); smaller panel 17 ¾ x 21 ½ in. (45 x 54.6 cm).Executed in 2000.Provenance
Galerie Foksal, WarsawWilhelm Sasnal's painting takes shape in the accelerated time of the political changed in Poland in the 1990s. It moves in the gap between the attempt to identify with his own origins and the simultaneous awareness of the necessity of the present social change. The discovery of a personal path as an artist, a path that displays his origins while at the same time reflecting knowledge of the aesthetic models currently being practiced. His works oscilates between two extremes, deliberately borrowing from existing works on the one hand and the other producing intentionally hermetic images that thematize private moments. (C. Path, "Mo´scice", Wilhelm Sasnal: Night and Day, Ostfildern-Ruit, p.9)

Developing as an artist in the time period following the fall of the communism, Wilhelm Sasnal has created a body of work that is wide reaching and eclectic but at the same time manages to maintain an aura of singularity that defines him as an artist. He draws upon a variety of images present in his day to day life. His paintings are a direct response to the over abundance of images that flooded the area of Eastern Europe in the post Soviet era. He uses painting as a means to intimately negotiate his position within (new) capitalist culture. Sasnal's work is prolific, varied and deliberately unclassifiable as a strategy: digesting his practice is akin to swallowing mass media whole. (Saatchi Gallery press release).

Through his paintings, Sasnal establishes his own view of the world. His work also stands in a simultaneously intimate and distanced relationship to his personal evolution in presentday Poland. One of Sasnal's goals for his paintings is to challenge the traditional expectations of perception and representation. Using a predominantly black and white color palette Sasnal strips his subjects down to their basic form – their barest essentials. In removing all reference to their original meaning he is effectively transforming them, morphing them into something entirely new. The images no longer represent something of the "real world", instead they become self-referential.. It in doing so that he empowers his works to resist interpretation. He enables the painting to "become the medium in which on reflects one's own surroundings, and thus more a medium of reception than representation" (ibid., p. 10).

The present lot Czeczenia is a prime example of this working process. The two panels comprising this work illustrate a scene of a stark bleak landscape with a lone figure crouching staring off into the horizon. Using a restrained palette of muted black white and gray Sasnal illustrates a simple yet power scene. One can not help but notice the photographic quality that the larger panel posseses. That is the placement of the figure and the rendering of the background appear as though they could have been taken directly from a photograph; as is the case with many of his paintings. through its impartial and sterile surface, only faint traces of historical significance and reference to the tangible world remain. After succumbing to the reductive development process the images that remain in the present lot are merely vestiges of their former selves. They come to embody the "ideal" or essence of what they once were, very much the way that the shadows reflected on the wall in Plato's Cave were embodiments or "ideal" representations of the world that they were reflecting.

Wilhelm Sasnal's practice doesn't celebrate freedom, but a shift in conformity. It strives to define personal experience of an impersonal world. Through his painting, he explores a no man's land where private and public converge in a sluice of shared memory. Operating as his own self-sustaining information source, Wilhelm Sasnal imposes his world order on politics, celebrity, art history and banality, quietly developing a position of individual conscience (Night and Day, Ostfildern-Ruit, p. 9).