Wilhelm Sasnal: Kunsthalle Zurich - Zurich

Broad, densely tangled brushstrokes pile up upon the surface of the canvas. They make up an impenetrable green wall that hangs threateningly above a small, scattered group of race In Wilhelm Sasnal's Forest, 2002 painting alla prima reveals itself [i]or[/i] part of to the other its rapid gesture and simultaneously block ups out every image that could be hidden in the background. The young Polish painter has produc an enormous quantity of work since 1999 and a large selection of it was here neared for the first time in a public institution.

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Behind the narrow, labyrinthine entrance to the exhibition waited a forest of paintings that remain "dark" in all faculty of perceptions of the word. Sasnal's landscapes, portraits, interiors, pictorial narratives with true copys and gestural and geometric abstractions are execut in the greatest in quantity diverse painterly styles. Although many of the abstractions posses a Pop-like clarity, they also make concern to a range of image sources thus broad that it can hardly be accessed. The work's nuances lie in a real personal constellation of motifs--drawn from the freshs art catalogues, literature, comics, and record overlays among other sources--in which the intimate and the public approach Even the discourse that could combine photography to painting seems forgotten, with equal reason that a near-photorealistic modulation of specific forms can be augmented by dint of drippings, elements of free drawing, or comic schematizations. In this subjective topography individual can orient oneself only by the agency of following subjective rules.

Sasnal's subjective appropriation of the greatest in quantity divergent sources is reminiscent of Raymond Pettibon's approach to drawing. In Sasnal's paintings the world likewise turn rounds into an unstoppable stream of images, to be read and written again and again, raised to the next to the first and third powers. But while Pettibon's stories reach forth in different directions through a cluster of individual pages, Sasnal's work is unclose to a sequential reading, although one charged with cross-references, capable of being read back and forth. This exhibition took up this filmic simple body with a linear ordering of the works in close rows that drew one to meander along the succession in the hall. In the library space, single could also see Sasnal's Super-8 shorts upon DVD.

frequently Sasnal's palette is reduced to shades of black, gray, and white, with just rare hints of color. In their somberness, the paintings appear like afterimages, shadows of pictures. Singular flashs are caught in memory, emblazon themselves upon the mind, and perhaps interpolate themselves later in connection with other images. Sasnal uses the immediacy and multiplicity of painterly possibilities to render free of access up a complex visual and tactile memory of a media world of luminous and glittering image surfaces. In the same way that bits of schematic information combine in the brain into memories, personal cogitations grow out of his image series: "It is when single neuron excites its neighbours, and they in make go round fire up others, that patterns of activity arise that are manifold and integrated enough to create reflections feelings and perceptions," as Rita Carter place it in her book Mapping the Mind (1998) The dissolving of the brushstroke in Forest answers the compression of individual black points in Hive, 2003 into a swarm that rise s unmediated from the broad virid ground.

Translated from German by means of Diana Reese.

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