Going to the other side at Lismore

Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal’s ‘Take Me To The Other Side’ is the latest exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts, the gallery in the west wing of William Burlington’s Co Waterford home.

Sasnal is one of the few Polish artists who has an international reputation, and Take Me To The Other Side is named after a track by the band, Spacemen 3. The exhibition features paintings and films, and is inspired by the writings of Hans Christian Andersen

This is Sasnal’s first exhibition in Ireland since a solo show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 2006. “I know William [Burlington] has been a fan of my work for some time,” he says. “I first visited Lismore in November, 2012, and I found the place very, very special. The gallery is really unique.”

Sasnal’s love of Andersen stems from childhood and the books’ spooky illustrations.

Sasnal says Andersen’s tales are darker and more subversive than is commonly thought. “The stories are very peculiar, but that’s what I like about them. I think I’m very sentimental about these stories, because they were with me since I was a kid.

“Sometimes, you have no clue what they are about — it isn’t always clear. They can be about crime and punishment, but sometimes the characters who misbehave are left without punishment. Today, we can judge them differently than Anderson did.”

Take Me To The Other Side includes 16 of Sasnal’s paintings, and two short experimental films that have soundtracks by Iggy and the Stooges.

Some of the paintings are from Sasnal’s studio, while others are specifically for the show. “I paint regularly,” he says. “So I first made a selection from my existing paintings. I combined my new works with this selection, so there was some sort of consistency. The idea of making work around Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales was that they somehow referred to the atmosphere of Lismore Castle.”

Sasnal’s paintings are in different sizes and styles; some were made quickly, while others are more polished.

“I don’t want to be just limited to one way of painting, one genre,” he says. “I don’t want to bore myself, I want to find something interesting, to just go from one way of painting to another, to try many things, and I don’t mind if I sometimes make mistakes.”

Not all the images relate to Andersen’s stories, but there is an otherworldly quality to all the work, accentuated by Sasnal’s use of colour: a few of the paintings are in black and white and grey, but his palette is elsewhere more expansive, particularly in his untitled landscapes.

One of the most striking paintings features a bicycle saddle floating in space above a river. Sasnal says that the image dates to a trip he took to India.

“I was biking across Goa and I took a ferry from one bank of a river to the other. On the ferry, in front of me, was my bicycle. I looked at the sky and the trees and the river, and the saddle was in the middle of the view. I saw this surrealistic image and I took a photo and I painted it. I like these surreal images. They’re like the psychedelia of the 1960s.”

Wilhelm Sasnal’s ‘Take Me To The Other Side’ runs at Lismore Castle Arts until Sunday. Lismorecastlearts.ie.