Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
SAnya Kantarovsky’s paintings are filled with distortions and failures: figures that bite and bind each other to surrender, bleed, appear magical or sometimes turn into mushrooms. The otherworldly intensity that has defined a 44-year career to date is as strong as ever in his new show, The Biggest Failurewhich recently opened in Venice to coincide with Biennale.
Located in Venice’s Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts – a palazzo with a high ceiling and a black stone floor, walls lined with old books – the exhibition begins with a small painting, Boy With Cigarette, in which the young, wrinkled, wet face of a boy is seen, with a black cigarette in a black cigarette. moth-like fingers. As Kantarovsky observes, his characters “feel strange and foreign at the same time”. This saturnine image contradicts the description of the nearby randomness – the child spins on the spot, his dress flying up, as if without the weight of any shame.
Russian-born, New York-born Kantarovksy has risen to prominence over the past decade following major exhibitions in Turin and Zurich, as well as a stunning solo exhibition on his 150th birthday. Chiya (traditional wooden house) in Tokyo, where his paintings seemed to connect with the spirits that “dwell” there. His art has the dark humor of an old Russian book, but reaches out to artists such as Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and Milton Avery. For Kantarovksy, the power of art and literature lies in the way it communicates, or as he puts it: “How art can be divided and give parts of the human experience something that someone can deeply identify with.”
This conflict is what drives his exhibitions, which arrive, he says, as “experiments between artists and viewers” by disrupting our expectations of “what is allowed to be shown”. For example, in Basic Failure we see a vivid picture of a panda toy, the kind of picture that can be found in the back of a dusty charity shop, just before the spine and glass explosion of a little boy – fun. A 16th century painting by Antonello Gagini – bright light in the room only. On closer inspection, there is a disturbing shadow under his eye. At first they read like scribble or graffiti. In fact, it is the remains of a dead spider.
Kantarovsky moved to the US only four months after the fall of the Soviet Union in late 1991. I ask if that, too, has affected his work. “Of course, I’m homesick,” says the artist hesitantly, “but it’s one of the many things that informs my work.” If Kantarovksy paints the lives of people who have been put aside, who have lost the qualities that made them seem alive or valuable, then his works are often affected by the feelings of those who fled their country out of fear or need.
This uncertainty is heightened by the fact that he shows his people from the heart rather than directly from life. Kantarovsky says that his work is a way of investigating the unknown, of “breaking the law of reality in a way to create a double sensation, where the road to be taken is not known but leads to reproductive things”. He agrees with the saying of Philip Guston – an artist he admires – that “art is fed by the ordinary and the ordinary”. However, Kantarovsky explores what “ordinary” might actually mean. “I almost put up these barriers that prevent a real story from being made,” he says. “I see my paintings as narrative pieces.”
In conversation, Kantarovsky thinks and analyzes. He said: “My goal is to be surprised by what I’m doing. “I usually start to draw, but it’s like a Ouija board thing, where I listen to the drawing.” His work seems to penetrate our unconscious, and some people have given it a psychoanalytical reading. “I’m very interested in the moment when it’s so familiar with what we’re looking at,” he says. “When something insists so often that it makes it interesting, strange or strange.”
This idea of how the absurd appears every day is also found in the title of the show, Basic Failure, a phrase that comes from Kantarovsky in creating art – “failure to translate something in your head but which you continue to do”. It also has implications in psychoanalysis for the parent’s ultimate failure to meet the child’s needs. This is especially important in Kantarovsky in Italy, where there are religious icons. As he sees it, in Christianity “we are born bad, born guilty, and we start trying to redeem ourselves”.
Indeed, walking the labyrinthine streets of Venice, the countless churches, votive niches and altars are impossible to ignore – even if the crowds of tourists block the view. One of his books was created in Venice Masaccio’s c1425 depiction of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise; Kantarovsky reworks the classic Renaissance painting as something empty and sinister, a haunting portrait of a man broken by neurosis. He sees a weak person as “someone who leaves a party late at night remembering something bad or embarrassing they said”.
Throughout the show, there is a recurring image of the figures shielding their faces with their hands – the child-like hope of being invisible by cutting out his eyes when captured. This is also found in the new major work Death of the Centaur, which sees a mythical half-human creature, a horse that seems to have fallen from the sky, hooves and a painted body, vulnerable to the gray sky. Its large size retains its power even when it competes with the palazzo fireplace. However, Kantarovksy finally refutes such ideas of original sin, fall from grace, by finding hope in Buddhism, the doctrine that we are born good before we are “full of life, and different kinds of karma”. Perhaps it is this good karma that Kantarovsky has placed in the world to come again.
