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Tuesday, August 19, 2014

QUOTES

Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in

~leonard cohen

“If you’re a painter, you’re not alone. There’s no way to be alone.”
Franz Kline - sometimes I wonder...

Friday, August 8, 2014

Wilhelm Sasnal, Lismore Castle Arts Centre, Lismore, Co. Waterford

Set inside a gothic castle, paintings and films in this show were an exploration of how Wilhelm Sasnal has interpreted his memories of  Hans Christian Anderson's books of fairy tales, which he read as a  young boy in Poland. He was  particularly fascinated by the illustrations of Audrzej Strumillo. 
Sasnal is thought to have selected the venue on a visit in 2012 and decided this body of work, emanating from his fascination with the illustrations, would be a great match.
The gallery is long and rectangular with suspended beams across the vaulted ceiling with roof windows. It was very well lit at the time by both natural and artificial lighting and white painted walls. It is contemporary looking and relatively small and intimate in relation to the very large scale of the old castle it resides in.


The sound of ‘Dirt’ 1970 by The Stooges was playing in the background as a soundtrack to a film (playing at one end of the long first room) by Sasnal called Inhuman Finger,  It was about a girl who tries to use a loaf of bread as a stepping stone into another world without getting her shoes dirty. Things go wrong and she ends up falling off in to hell. Perhaps the bread serves as a metaphor for potential path to freedom (in more ways than one)


Among a number of paintings containing floating objects was one containing a large black bike seat bizarrely suspended in mid air on a summery blue and white sky, above a large expanse of green and blue still water. Black silhouetted trees and vegetation travel along the low horizon,  tapering off into the distance. The bike seat totally dominates the scene.
Unitled 2013
http://de.phaidon.com/resource/sasnal-untitled2013.jpg


My favourite, is another painting containing a surreal floating object. A smaller painting, this time (2' x 2') containing a hovering skull, devoid of a jaw, within whose black eye sockets could be a black castle; the castle's black windows acting as its eyes. The skull floats low slung on a  large expanse of jade green sky like background. A thickly painted deep yellow sun, egg yolk like, hovers above to the upper right. Along the bottom is a horizon of jagged acid green mountains.  On first glance is deceptively simple in appearance but on closer inspection I realized there appears to quite an intriguing narrative at work.
http://cristinleach.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/photo-52-e1415012045838.jpg


Frequent clever characteristics of his paintings are their sparse brushwork – just enough detail to get the message across by evoking a sense of all the elements belonging where they are on the picture surface as a cohesive whole. Certain distinguishing features of many portraits are what I would describe as half painted, with partly blank or unidentifiable faces. This small portrait of the artist’s brother by Valdemar_Hjartvar_Kobke, is no exception. He was a Danish Golden Age painter  who was a contemporary of Hans Christian Anderson. The only exeptions to the monochromatic palette of black and browns on the head are the red and yellow on the military collar. In Sasnal’s interpretation, a remake of the original he has been very sparing in his description of the facial features; says it all with just a few spontaneous lines and marks. The facial features fade out to a totally blank white area - the lower left side of the face.
Original portrait:



Monochrome landscape 
http://magazynszum.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SZUM-20140612-00-15-420x280.jpg

View of gallery
http://magazynszum.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SZUM-20140611-23-27-420x280.jpg