Sasnal’s sun-soaked Californian road trip turned sinister. The highway’s coastal expanse, recorded here in the painter’s usual Adobe Illustrator style, is unmarked by the signs of life. The streets play host to murder, and the luxury apartment to solitude. The wholesome teenager who in one canvas offers the painter some lemons is sure to be hiding a switchblade behind his back. The reservoir barely hides the night. “LA”, as a canvas precariously propped up by a ladder proclaims, “is not safe”.
Perhaps. Parts of the exhibition support this narrative, as does the LA Times. But Sasnal’s untitled, unmediated project switches tracks from one canvas to the next. The scenes’ intense sunshine and the odd technological instructible paintings thrown into the mix saw seeds of doubt if not discord.
This universe is half picture postcard and half dystopian meme. Reality, in a word. But Sasnal’s paint stays flatly on the canvas. Only in flights of anger – somehow too studied but too indecisive – does this vision come close to becoming believable.
