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Wilhelm Sasnal has transformed the ground floor of Sadie Coles’ elegant gallery into a parade of broken images: the Oval Office, a ghastly forest, a blasted tree trunk, the artist’s wife and daughter, a British post-punk band, and the sitting US president surrounded by cronies, his face resembling the burn produced by screwing a lit cigarette into a photograph.

These paintings, most of which are untitled, are broken in the sense that an online link can be broken: it is difficult to connect them to their source. (It would be useful to know the location of that tree, for instance.) They are also broken in that they do not fit together as a whole. What connects that revolting White House interior, with its acid greens and faecal browns, with a spooky forest? What links President Trump to the founders of industrial music?

Some connections gradually suggest themselves, if only because we are wired to find patterns in random distributions. The largest painting reproduces at monumental scale the cover art of Throbbing Gristle’s sardonically titled album 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Sardonic because this notoriously hostile record was produced by a band famously described (in their previous incarnation) as “wreckers of civilisation” by a Tory MP.

The same nihilistic humour informs the sleeve photograph, for which the band posed in a bucolic landscape like fresh-faced recruits to the English folk revival. Cosey Fanni Tutti looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but the dead-eyed stare of Genesis P-Orridge gives the game away. Because the backdrop for this apparently innocent image is the cliff at Beachy Head, Britain’s most popular suicide spot.

Anyone familiar with Sasnal’s oeuvre will connect the broad stripes of grass into which the band sink to the Polish artist’s 2003 painting Shoah (A Forest). And so an artefact of cultural sophistication – because 20 Jazz Funk Greats is the kind of record you might leave on display to communicate your tastefully radical taste – is linked to the Holocaust. This loose association of avant-garde art with genocide is, for any visitor to a gallery, uncomfortable. But it is by no means the most unsettling association.

Sasnal is a film-maker as well as a painter, and the technique of running diverse images together to imply new connections is familiar from cinema as montage (think of how, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a tossed bone transforms into a spinning spaceship). The method relies on the viewer’s willingness to bridge the difference, and so the difficulty arrives when you try to fit the artist’s tender portrait of his wife and daughter into this exhibition’s patchwork of suicide, murder and corruption. Because any attempt to make that connection feels obscene.

History is by and large a force from which we hope to protect our loved ones. But they are separated in the title of this exhibition, family/history, by nothing more substantial than the stroke that separates one line of poetry from the next. On social media, of course, even this flimsy boundary has been pulled down, so that holiday snaps compete with atrocities. This has contributed to a crisis in visual perspective, and it is this crisis that Sasnal’s work reproduces.

Upstairs is a portrait of the artist’s son Kacper. Lying on a sofa with a book on his knees, he reaches across to his laptop like God stretching out to Adam. The absorption (in a book, in one’s own thoughts) that was characteristic of 19th-century portraiture is replaced by scattered attention, as the subject flits distractedly between media platforms. History is playing out on our screens, and we can’t tear ourselves away from it.

Kacper hangs next to two small pastoral idylls. Like the painter’s 2010 take on Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, they show men alone on riverbanks. One of the figures is extracted from William Tylee Ranney’s 1850 The Lazy Fisherman. Sasnal would not be the first father to suggest that his son put away the laptop and get some fresh air, but he is not a painter of bluff optimism. So it useful to know that his grandmother once told him that, in the summer of 1939, the river near his birthplace in Tarnów was thronged with bathers. Nowhere, not even utopia, is safe from history.

After the explosive start, the upstairs galleries struggle to hold the viewer’s attention. Family portraits and holiday scenes predominate, and without those staged collisions with history, the tension slackens. By the time you come to paintings of a band on stage and two paintings of bums in shorts, the energy has dissipated into banality. So I returned to the first room and tried again to make sense of it.

I couldn’t, and this might be the point. By bridging the gap between two contrasting images, montage aspires to reveal some greater truth, some higher logic. Sasnal’s works do not do this. Instead they produce a feeling of unease. The coexistence of good and evil cannot so easily be explained away, nor can we entirely protect the people we love from history. In their double portrait, Rita and Anka are facing away from us, as if to shield them from our gaze. They look out to a calm sea, and away from the horrors on the walls around them.