The work of this Polish muralist can be appreciated across the globe: from the streets of Los Angeles to Miami, from Marocco to Australia. Przemysław Blejzyk – better known to an international audience as Sainer, as well as a member of the Etam Cru duo – has already made street art history with his original and recognizable style. Nonetheless, the exhibition ‘SAINER. COLOUR,’ held in one of the branches of the National Museum in Gdańsk, marks his first extensive solo show, which attracted droves of enthusiasts to its opening.
The exhibition in the Department of Modern Art presents the artist as a landscapist. It is the landscape that inspires Blejzyk’s return to the rudiments of painting. By studying the landscape, he is studying the time, combining his small images to create large collages reflecting the times of day, reproducing a moving landscape and associated atmosphere. Ultimately, his concepts become compositions of colours and shapes, the forms are reduced and captured through their essence not as realistic portrayals of human subjects but rather sums of these colours and shapes. Analysis and synthesis.
The meaning of his latest visual compositions emerges from the cross-linear relations – the network of connections reminiscent of virtual reality. Harmony and rhythm introduced into a piece visually deconstruct a perceived world while bringing to it a formal order – from a manual drawing, through a digital pixel image, to the detail and bright, intense colour. The artist himself emphasizes the fact that here colour is a narrator, yet this narrator doesn’t describe reality. Colour is an interpretation thereof that hardly ever does appear “just as it is” in nature. In the colour palette used by Sainer one could easily discern dominant hues, such as bright greens or intense, cold pink – colours that are now trending according to Pantone.
In recent years, Sainer has gained considerable acclaim as a muralist and artist behind large-format paintings on building walls in cities all over the world. A wealth of experience, which he gathered while painting murals, amplifies the conceptual and aesthetic quality of the pieces displayed in this solo show. Like jigsaw puzzles, a cohesive whole of enormous canvases often consists of a number of smaller pieces. They depict a rural landscape; the surface of a canvas offers a space for adding more content by guiding the viewer through an analysis thread of colour and shape. In that sense, the artist discloses his own interpretation and transforms a given colour into the main motif of sorts. In Sainer’s paintings, colour and shape are subject to transformation. As a result, the paintings contain traces of the painter himself – his personality, artistic philosophy, and aesthetic.
Landscapes presented in this exhibition are approached analytically: trees are reduced to solid figures, meadows are represented by strips of colour, similarly to the sky and clouds. Spots stand for animals, while their shadows are colourful dots, tiny squares, and triangles. The artist willingly demystifies his craftsmanship by revealing the fact that an analysis of an image imitating the one conducted by the computer – based on a rhythmic sequence of signs – serves as his main tool. The painting is a collection of spots in various colours, pixels, whether on a computer screen or a canvas. In lieu of a subject there is composition. In the case of Sainer’s practice, composition is the subject, and the landscape is only a suggestion, material subject to interpretation.
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Cedar Lewisohn is a London-based curator, writer and artist, known as an expert and researcher on street art and graffiti. He curated the exhibition Street Art (2008) at Tate Modern and Rude Britannia (2010) at Tate Britain. He is an author of publications Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution (Tate 2010) and Abstract Graffiti (Merrell, 2011). He opened the door of fine art galleries for street art and graffiti, putting street art in an art historical context. Cedar curated olso the Canals Project. Street Art on the Waterways in East London.
The digital world of Sainer – present and real just like nature – is equal. In his world, a computer screen is a surface of a painting, and a surface of a painting is a canvas, as well as a wall on which he paints his mural. There is an ongoing game between the digital and the natural world. It is a game of aesthetics. The aesthetic of pixelated shapes permeates the images painted on canvas afterwards. Sainer sees these images in the real world, then sketches them as if they were some sort of preliminary graphic from an early computer game, in which a whole character is built from a couple of squares. Sainer does this intentionally, captivated by this line of interpretation. He composes his paintings out of pixels, painting those pixels on canvases, thus reducing the reality of nature to a composition of shapes, colourful figures, and surfaces.
The exhibition ‘SAINER. COLOUR’ showcases a wide variety of the artist’s works – from a sketchbook filled with figure studies, through outdoor pieces, landscapes and their deconstruction captured through the medium of screen printing, to large-scale collages resulting from an evolution of his visual language. Sainer is also no stranger to music analogies, which complete his visual compositions and traverse the frames of paintings, highlighting an analytical and inquisitive mind of the artist. Paintings presented in this exhibition are complemented by the latest works created specifically for this show, such as an augmented reality piece, which fits well into the digital aesthetic of Sainer’s new paintings, or animations playing on LED screens created in collaboration with Ksawery Kirklewski.
This brand-new world seems to build a bridge between the past – a steady component of landscapes – and the relentlessly overflowing digital stream. The synthesis of a landscape ignited by a trendy colour becomes a point of departure for the show. The exhibition in the Opatów Palace emphasizes Sainer’s excellent skill as an illustrator and a landscapist. However, the landscape portrayed in this practice serves just as an inspiration for further interdisciplinary endeavours. In order to illustrate and better grasp the artist’s path, the exhibition spans across several rooms of the National Museum. Looking at the earlier achievements of the artist, one can see how his creative technique has evolved over time. Throughout the years, Sainer has veered away from the detail in pursuit of new means of expression and study of a composition.
The exhibition presents the painter, illustrator, muralist and landscaper who draws fully on the traditions of impressionism, fauvism and the Polish school of landscape painting, asking himself what and how he should paint if he could paint anything. Sainer embraces nature, and yet his eyes gaze upon the world in which a computer screen has melded into landscape, just like the trees, rocks, and sea. The artist processes all these elements internally and conjures the world inhabited by people and animals, even though the painting is an abstract relation – a composition of shapes and colours arranged by the artist in a way that conveys a message through the colour code. At the height of abstraction he tells the story of a piercing atmosphere of places, people, and contexts, so that everything is transparent, even though the artist uses only shape and colour as his medium.
Written by Daga Ochendowska
“Sainer. Colour“
National Museum in Gdańsk
Department of Modern Art – the Opatów Palace
opening: 22 July 2023
artist: Przemysław Blejzyk aka Sainer
curator: Agata Abramowicz
In August 2019, international street artists flocked to Vienna city to participate in Calle Libre Festival. This Festival for Urban Aesthetics turned the city into a colourful space.
We selected 5 murals we liked the most stating the exact location where to find them in the city. If you plan your trip to Vienna, follow this alternative route and check out Instagram accounts of street artists.
