‘It’s like a Ouija board – I listen to the painting’: the supernatural art of Sanya Kantarovsky
The Russian-born artist’s work can hypnotise, deceive or even transform into a mushroom. He talks about his Venice show full of Christian iconography and haunting depictions of children Sanya Kantarovsky’s...
By Chris McCormack · The Guardian Culture
The Russian-born artist’s work can hypnotise, deceive or even transform into a mushroom. He talks about his Venice show full of Christian iconography and haunting depictions of children Sanya Kantarovsky’s paintings are filled with the dishevelled and the fallible: figures that bite and pin each other into submission, draw blood, appear hypnotised or sometimes transmogrify into a mushroom. The otherworldly intensity that has defined the 44-year-old’s work to date is as strong as ever in his new show, Basic Failure , which recently opened in Venice to coincide with the Biennale . Located at Venice’s Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts – a palazzo with high ceilings and a dark terrazzo-marbled floor, the walls lined with antique books – the exhibition opens with the diminutive portrait, Boy With Cigarette, in which the thickly painted, pallid, downturned young face of a boy, outlined in darkening blue brushstrokes, is seen caressing an unlit cigarette with tendril-like fingers. As Kantarovsky observes, his characters “feel both familiar and kind of alien at the same time”. This saturnine image is counterbalanced by the giddy expression of innocence nearby – a child spins on the spot, her dress flying upwards, as if free from the weight of any embarrassment. Continue reading...