Sanya Kantarovsky: narrative snapshots for bigger plots (currently at Marc Foxx)

 

During our interviews with artists, we often ask them to name a novel that would be comparable to their idea of art. In the case of painter Sanya Kantarovsky we wouldn’t be surprised if he answered quoting some lines by Canadian writer Adam Gilders. In the current exhibition of his recent works at MARC FOXX Gallery in Los Angeles, a series of 14 paintings surrounds a sculptural composition made of a painted unstretched linen covering an invisible human body (a hand does appear from one of the folds) and topped by a colourful bird. Like the perfectly carved short stories of Adam Gilders, these artworks seem to behave as starting points or narrative snapshots for bigger plots. In both the words of Gilders and the brushstrokes of Kantarovsky, there seems to be an intention to cut big scenarios and arrive to a moment where a particular action takes place, an action that without being necessarily a crucial instant of a precise story to be heard, is the one that works generously in opening the viewer’s imagination about its possible continuation or past.

 

Adam Gilder, who died of brain cancer at the age of thirty-six, wrote hundreds of short pieces with obsessive care for words, most of which were collected after his death in 2007 and published in a book called Another Ventriloquist (2011, J&L Books). The title figure of a storyteller sharing tales through an inanimate third party in between him or her and the public, brings us to speak about the medium and how this is able to formally intermediate. While in the case of Gilders it is the special use of jumps in the language, scarcity and the dense significance of every word, the formal quality of Kantarovsky’s paintings resides in the meaningful and narrative use of different techniques on the same canvas. Taking Blue Agency for example, we see one of the characters being somehow oppressed by the other and so painted with soft rough pastel marks whereas the weighty oil paint is used to enhance the sense of strength borne by the oppressor. At the same time, the linen of the canvas is left untreated to highlight both techniques by contrasting the painted parts with the weave of the fabric.

 

At the same time, the figure of the ventriloquist also suggests forms of manipulation and control, which in Kantarovsky’s art at MARC FOXX can be found in the often ambiguous relationship between the characters of his paintings. Whether the manipulator/controller is strictly acting within sexual practices like in the case of Sleazeballs or Squeeze or public circumstances like the aircraft of Sky Alliance or the street of Lavender Arrest, a sort of authority game is often taking place. Even in the only three dimensional piece in the exhibition (Mondays), it is not only the weight of the sloppy linen that is squashing a human figure down but symbolically it is the bodies of the characters that are painted on it too.

Games of domination effectively works to develop plots in tales. In the case of Kantarovsky those tales are suggested within the compressed finitude of the artwork, qualities of many of Adam Gilders’ short stories. Similar in both topics and form, The Librarian seems to be the best example of this proximity, a sort of written version of a Kantarovsky’s painting. We quote it here in full:

 

‘Due to the especially delicate and sensitive nature of my concerns, I requested a private interview with the librarian. The moment I entered her office I saw that she was entirely too callous to appreciate or respond to my actual concerns, so I distracted her with ordinary observations on the general hygiene and appointment of the library, whereupon she violently accused me of wasting her time, which was really too much to bear, since it was actually she who was wasting my time’

March 9, 2015