CultureCritic interviews Wilhelm Sasnal...

Could you explain your statement, ‘there are no rules', in relation to your work?

It's about not boring oneself. I don't want to keep painting any one subject, or in any one style. I need to mix it all up - realistic, abstract, and film, too.

With this enormous scope, what would you say pulls all your work together?

The way in which I look through a ‘viewfinder' – through the camera or how I crop a photograph, or how I make a composition on a canvas. I am not a very funny person and my subjects are not very funny – there's something more attractive to me in darker rather than brighter things. That's probably common. I don't want to be evidently emotional.


Tsunami, 2011

You may not think you're very funny, but there were two paintings in this show, Church Interior 1 and 2, in which you focus in very closely on incredibly boring architectural details.

Well of course, there are moments... but I think I tend more towards the dark, the vague, or the hidden, that's what intrigues me.

Given that you work from images found on the Internet as well as from your own photographs, can you explain what it is in any certain image that might attract you?

Anticipation, and how much it is useful for a painting. Although that's a stupid word, useful can be just to make money... but a certain obscurity and ambiguity. When I see a subject as interesting enough, I do more research and find images related to the topic. But it's just a feeling really, that something is worth painting.


Kacper and Anka, 2009

Mystery seems important. Why don't you put personal features on faces, for example?

I like it when people project their imagination onto a painting, by themselves.

Are there any strong Polish influences that we may not of have heard of in your work?

Of course, I am from that part of the world and I'm not going to deny it. Its mood is not that distant from the British mood, probably because of the weather. There is a certain heaviness in it that I like.

Kacper, 2009

Where does (or did) your interest in Pop art come from?

I'm not so much any more, but I used to be quite interested in it, and pop music. Reality changed very quickly after '89. I remember this enormous shift from grey, black and white to this colourful and of course completely superficial reality.

Do you mean in Poland in general?

Yes. I hated it. This rubbish, these stupid billboards, it was just completely flooded. I think my reaction to pop culture was quite unconscious though, not necessarily as conscious as what Warhol did, for example. It was just choosing this cheap language to work with.

Is it true that you worked in advertising before you became an artist?

I did for a couple years in the late-90s. It was about ideas though, I wasn't a graphic designer.

Could you talk about the moment when you decided to take on the Holocaust as a subject?

That was around 2000. The graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, and the film Shoah [a nine-and-a-half hour documentary on the Holocaust by Claude Lanzmann], and another important book about Polish commitment during that time, Neighbours, by Jan Tomasz Gross, were released. They found a certain function in the public space, and started huge discussion, but it was also very important for me as a person interested in the history of the place I am from. The Holocaust as an historical fact is very important. It's this transgression on many levels, it's about human nature, and about wondering, ‘how would I behave if I had to face it?'


Shoah (Forest), 2003

You sometimes take on weighty subjects, but your paintings are very attractive. How important is that to you?

If a painting is repulsive, it's also attractive in a certain way. But in all these paintings relating to the Holocaust, I didn't use material directly taken from reality, it was always based on existing cultural material. I didn't touch it directly; I somehow used the subject through something else.

That work seems to be from a certain period for you, say the early 2000s. Is your work opening out more now?

Yes, I feel completely free, but I cannot say I have given certain subjects up for good, or certain types of paintings. Maybe I'm done with such heavy subjects as the Holocaust. People have said too much about it, and I have been asked too much about it. But I cannot say that for sure.
Maus 5, 2001

It has been said that music is important to you, (I have heard you were a metal fan). Has it been important towards your practise?

I listen to quite a lot of really heavy stuff, but I also listen to a lot of classical music. I don't listen to much alternative ‘young' music anymore. Music, or being a fan, used to be very important, much more important than painting itself in the beginning. It made me much more connected to culture than painting did.

How do you work, when you do?

I go in in the morning, with an image I want to work with, and I try to complete the painting perhaps within a couple of hours. If it's not enough, I work on it again the next day.

Do you map out an image first underneath, before you start painting?

Yes, I use grids and I redraw images from photographs onto the canvas.

What is the longest you have spent on a painting?

Apart from the Saturn paintings [which were painted, or painted and washed away for seven days], which was a conscious project to do something that took that long, three days.

Power plant in Iran, 2010

Have you been to the Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern?

Yes, and I liked it very much. I learnt a lot from Richter. The moment I entered the gallery and saw his early works, I understood that this where I'm from, these are the roots of my practise, and not just mine, but for my generation, of these kind of artists.

Have you got any plans to do any more feature films?

Yes. We're we are starting a script for a new film, with a possible release next year. It's about an old man, and a young woman with a baby.

Tacita Dean's new piece FILM, also at Tate Modern, is about the end of analogue film. You use 16mm, are you worried about its demise?

It's not a crucial issue for me. I don't film in the way I used to, as I did for the films in this exhibition, I use more advanced technology now. I like analogue, but it is just a tool. The camera I like the most now is the one on my mobile, so I'm not that obsessed with the beauty of celluloid or anything. However, I could not imagine myself painting with anything other than oils, but maybe that's another issue...

Read the latest reviews for Wilhelm Sasnal at the Whitechapel Gallery here.