Sainer: A Living Canvas of Colour & Code

One room, seven works. Classical paintings, printouts of digital paintings on acrylic glass, and finally animations of digital sketches turned into moving images. The exhibition is titled ‘Kolorganism’, because according to Przemysław Blejzyk, better known as Sainer, all of his pieces work together and connect with one another like one large, pulsating organism.

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Przemysław Blejzyk (Sainer), photo: Aleksandra Mac/MNG

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In the exhibition hall of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, the biggest first impression comes from the huge formats of the works. What then strikes you is the colours – intense, expressive, and arranged in unconventional configurations. Then its the movements happening on the huge eight-metre-long screen, its differently-coloured geometric shapes constantly shifting positions. At the very end, something else catches the eye – a miniature (compared to the rest) work, ‘framed’ in a spatial, organic frame.

Being with Blejzyk’s works is a journey into an extraordinary colourful world. His pixel compositions look like freeze frames from old computer games that rebelled against the rules of play and began to create their own worlds. Here and there, this geometric world is dominated by irregular coloured spots and fragments devoid of intense colour. In some places, realistically painted figures appear, like ghosts from another dimension.

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Kolorganism by Przemysław Blejzyk (Sainer) at Künstlerhaus Vienna, April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

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In the case of Sainer’s latest works, the starting point is most often an observed landscape that he sketches into a simplified form before processing and reducing it, often to the point of completely losing its original appearance. In doing so, he focuses on extracting the aspects that interest him:

I look at how forms and colours in different media and aesthetics interact with each other, functioning on one plane of the image. I look for their mutual relationships... Previously, painting was largely subordinated to what I planned to paint. Now, what I create results from the process itself and the formal assumptions that I impose on myself that often arise during creation. I don’t always know where it’ll take me, and that’s fascinating. Thanks to that, the process of painting itself is much more interesting.

Finding freedom in scale

Mural Przemysława Blejzyka (Sainer) (z grupy EtamCru), Łódź, fot. Grzegorz Michałowski/PAP — A mural by Przemysław Blejzyk (Sainer) (of EtamCru), Łódź, photo: Grzegorz Michałowski/PAP

Przemysław Blejzyk started his career a dozen or so years ago fascinated by graffiti culture. As a teenager, he participated in graffiti jams, learned how to use sprays and paints, and painted on walls. However, he was always more interested in figurative representations and portraits than in traditional graffiti lettering. During his studies at the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, together with his friend and fellow student Mateusz Gapski, they formed the Etam Crew. The muralist scene was experiencing a real boom at the time and they became one of its most expressive creative teams. Their large-format murals made an impression due to their unusual realism and level of detail, all set in fabulously surreal spaces. As the Etam Cru, they gained fame, took part in dozens of festivals and art events, and travelled the world. In their heyday, they were on the road for weeks at a time, travelling from city to city, from wall to wall. Their murals can be found in Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Los Angeles and Miami. They painted in Norway, Bulgaria, Portugal, Belgium, Sweden, Russia and Slovakia. In Poland, their works can be found in Łódź, Warsaw and Katowice.

Although his current works have come a long way since those earlier phases, Blejzyk admits that without them, there would be no paintings in his studio today.

Graffiti was something that made me understand that I wanted to be part of the world of visual culture. It motivated me to draw, to perfect my line. In addition, the feeling that accompanies creating a mural – up high, on a boom – is inimitable. This awareness that your work has a significant impact on changing the space in which it appears is incredible.

Murals gave him the freedom to use large formats, and also taught him self-confidence in making decisions. Sometimes such mundane things as a change in the weather, a sudden rain shower, meant that the project had to be changed. This made him no longer afraid of experimenting, as he would adapt the concept of work to the conditions, sometimes already ‘on the wall’. The artist also believes that all those years spent at events and festivals gave him self-confidence and familiarity with the art world. They opened the door to exhibitions in gallery spaces, where he began to show his paintings and graphics.

Deconstructing nature

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Kolorganism by Przemysław Blejzyk (Sainer) at Künstlerhaus Vienna, April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

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Over time, Sainer reached the point where he realised that he was able to paint everything in his style, in a realistic way. He could build more compositions set in these fairy-tale surreal worlds, but he decided he no longer felt completely comfortable with it. The process itself became quite boring for him. After years, he knew well what the final effect would look like, what he had to do step by step, all that was left was the tedious ‘execution’ of the project. He began to delve into the literature on the formal aspects of painting, re-read Strzemiński’s Theory of Vision, and returned to reading Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane. He studied Polish landscape painting – the works of Jan Stanisławski, the Kapists, especially Tadeusz Potworowski, and Artur Nacht-Samborski. He began to make sketches plein air and process these views in his own way.

He gradually introduced landscape elements into the portraits that were his trademark at the time, until at some point the landscapes began to take the main role, and the portrait was reduced to supplementation. Realistically painted figures appear only here and there, and they are in a completely new environment – that of the pixelated world of new technology. This phase was also visible in his murals from that period.

Landscape absorbed him more and more, but he did not know where this was heading. He was, however, fascinated by the fact that it could convey content without having to laboriously execute every detail – that basically the same could be expressed by focusing on the relationship of colour spots.

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Kolorganism by Przemysław Blejzyk (Sainer) at Künstlerhaus Vienna, April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

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And then came the pandemic and the lockdown, which paralysed the entire world for several months. Travel became impossible. All festivals and foreign invitations were cancelled. Holed up in his studio, Sainer began experimenting and, out of curiosity, repainting his landscape sketches onto pixels. These appeared in his work somewhat by accident – an unfulfilled commission for an album cover resulted in a new fascination. Following his curiosity further, Sainer began to reduce colourful views to an arrangement of single-colour squares.

Blejzyk explains that he looks at the landscape as a moving space that is constantly changing. From observing nature, he tries to abstract something more than just a static image – he wants to capture the colour relations that occur over time and build compositions from them:

By making this synthesis of the landscape into an acrylic painting, then a digital one, and finally turning it into an animation, I set it in motion again. These procedures create new relations, detached from the original view. These are the many different views of the landscape superimposed on one another.

He adds that it is still the same story, only in a different form, adapted to both modern times and the media he can use today.

From canvas to augmented reality

Przemysław Blejzyk (Sainer) during his solo show **Kolorganism** at Künstlerhaus Vienna, April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

The Sainer exhibition shown in Vienna closes a trilogy of exhibitions on colour prepared by the artist. The first, presented in 2022 at the Hangar 107 Center for Contemporary Art in Rouen, France, was titled Kolorytm and turned out to be groundbreaking for the artist. It was during its preparation that Sainer began to think more broadly about his colour explorations. He showed not only large-format works, but also sketches illustrating the evolution of thinking that led him to focus on colours. Its continuation was the KOL∞R exhibition in 2023 at the National Museum in Gdańsk Oliwa. Here, Blejzyk broadened the spectrum of techniques he uses, with screens and augmented reality appearing for the first time. After scanning a QR code, the viewer was transported to a new, augmented reality in which the works could be viewed in 3D.

I am constantly looking for new means of expression. I am developing a concept about the colour synthesis of landscapes. I want to create kinetic objects, animations, transfer my ideas to new media, and then, these experiences back to painting.

The possibilities offered by new technologies are extremely interesting to him. They show how much is still to be discovered when we introduce a dialogue between painting and digital technologies into the discourse about colour.

Sainer also explores his fascination with new technologies via the 1+1+1 Group, which he founded together with Łukasz Habiera and Krzysztof Syruć. Their work is a dialogue between easel painting and technology, in which colour serves as a carrier of narrative – both about what is visible and what is yet to be revealed. Elements characteristic of the digital world, such as pixels, glitches and banding, become tools of their painterly expression.

Originally written in Polish by Sylwia Kawalerowicz, translated May 2025 by Michał Pelczar

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The exhibition in Vienna shown in April 2025 was organised by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the National Museum in Gdańsk and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Vienna in cooperation with the Künstlerhaus Association. The exhibition was part of the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2025.

More of Sainer’s works can currently be viewed at Warsaw’s Kordegarda, where they are on show in a joint exhibition with Łukasz Habiera and Krzysztof Syruć (as Grupa 1+1+1). The exhibition lasts until 15^thJune 2025.

contemporary visual artist

contemporary art

Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union