Russian-born artist Sanya Kantarovsky's paintings are filled with dishevelled and fallible figures that bite, pin each other into submission, draw blood, appear hypnotised, or even transform into a mushroom. The otherworldly intensity defining the 44-year-old's work is as strong as ever in his new show, Basic Failure, recently opened in Venice to coincide with the Biennale.
The Exhibition at Venice's Institute of Sciences
Located at Venice's Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts, a palazzo with high ceilings and a dark terrazzo-marbled floor lined with antique books, the exhibition opens with the diminutive portrait Boy With Cigarette. This thickly painted, pallid, downturned face of a boy, outlined in darkening blue brushstrokes, caresses an unlit cigarette with tendril-like fingers. Kantarovsky observes his characters 'feel both familiar and kind of alien at the same time'. This saturnine image is counterbalanced by a giddy expression of innocence nearby: a child spins on the spot, her dress flying upwards, as if free from embarrassment.
Rise in Prominence and Artistic Influences
Kantarovsky, born in Russia and based in New York, has risen in prominence over the past decade following large exhibitions in Turin and Zurich, and a solo show in a 150-year-old machiya in Tokyo, where his artworks seemed to commune with ghostly spirits. His paintings have the dark humour of a classic Russian novel but reach out to artists like Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Milton Avery. For Kantarovsky, great art communicates in a way that 'splinters and renders aspects of someone's experience something another can deeply identify with, especially when those experiences are deeply problematic'.
Exploring Tension and the Unknown
This tension fuels his exhibitions, arriving as a 'dare between artist and viewer' by confounding expectations of 'what's allowed to be shown'. In Basic Failure, a scruffy painting of a toy panda appears like a charity shop find, shortly before a spine-tingling encounter with a remarkable glass bust of a young boy, a recreation of Antonello Gagini's 16th-century sculpture, dimly glowing alone. On closer inspection, a disturbing shadow under his eye reveals the remains of a dead spider.
Kantarovsky moved to the US four months after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. When asked about homesickness, he says with reluctance: 'Of course, I have homesickness, but it is just one of many things that informs my work.' His works are often haunted by those who fled their country out of fear or necessity.
Memory and Narrative Fragments
Kantarovsky depicts subjects from memory rather than life, exploring the unknown and 'breaking a rule of reality to produce a double take'. He agrees with Philip Guston that 'art is nourished by the common and ordinary', but probes what 'ordinary' means. 'I put barriers in place that prevent a literal narrative from being formed,' he says. 'I look at my paintings as narrative fragments.'
Psychoanalytical and Religious Themes
In conversation, Kantarovsky is thoughtful and analytical. 'My objective is to be surprised by what I'm doing,' he says. 'I often start drawing, but it is like a Ouija board, where I listen to the painting.' His work taps into the unconscious, and some offer psychoanalytical readings. 'I'm interested in a moment of over-identification,' he says, 'where something insists on a frequency so intensely it becomes comical, odd, or strange.'
The title Basic Failure refers to the failure to translate something in one's head while continuing to try, and also to the ultimate failure of a parent to fulfil a child's needs. This resonates in Italy, where religious imagery abounds. 'In Christianity, we're born bad, born guilty, and we get to work on redeeming ourselves,' Kantarovsky observes.
Venice and the Recurring Motif of Shielding Faces
Walking through Venice's labyrinthine streets, the innumerable churches and altars are impossible to ignore. One work references Masaccio's 1425 expulsion of Adam and Eve; Kantarovsky remakes the Renaissance painting as empty and sinuous, the anxious outline of a figure crushed by neurosis. He sees the dilapidated figure as 'someone leaving a party late at night remembering something awful or embarrassing they said'.
Throughout the exhibition, figures shield their faces with their hands, a childlike hope of becoming invisible. This appears in the large new work Death of the Centaur, where the mythical half-human, half-horse creature appears to have fallen from the heavens, its hoofs and body a smeared, vulnerable silhouette against a pale blue sky. Its colossal scale retains physical charge even against the palazzo's grand fireplace.
Kantarovsky counters concepts of original sin by finding hope in Buddhism, where we are born inherently good before being 'crowded by life and different types of karma'. It is perhaps this good karma that he has put into the world that is finally coming back around.
Sanya Kantarovsky: Basic Failure is at Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, Venice, until 22 November.
