Sanya Kantarovsky, Into the Blue by Elaine Tam

The sky blue butterfly 
Sways on a cornflower 
Lost in the warmth 
Of the blue heat haze 
Singing the blues 
Quiet and slowly 
Blue of my heart 
Blue of my dreams 
Slow blue love 
Of delphinium days.[1]

There are some paintings that have that tender-yet-cruel quality, a kind which makes your mouth involuntarily water. Sanya Kantarovsky is a painter of such paintings. Russian-born and New York-based, his work proffers a special breed of offbeat humour, of the tragicomical variety, poised on knife’s edge. Slicing. The protagonists inhabiting the works are often caught in the throes of emotional excess: erotically charged, they are moved to malefic atrocities, overwhelmed or incapacitated. Their narrational cues occurring out of view, we get the impression we glimpse lone, likely de-contextualised, frames. Slices. If rendered in realism, the ultra-violent scenes might find themselves at the level of mythological immensity or debased snuff. In Kantarovsky’s manner, however, we find 'this kind of very cartoon strategy [...] where the body is accentuating or exaggerating a movement by distorting its proportion.'[2] The artist plays to a suggestion of figuration, flitting between the outlandish self-reflexivity of illustration and, in fine moments, abstract potential. But more than an experiment with technique, form and type — more than just rendering scenes, themes or emotions — Kantarovsky’s cast do something exceptional: they inspire life-like empathy. 

Pablo Picasso, Les Noces de Pierrette, 1905. © Estate of Pablo Picasso

It goes without saying that Kantarovsky is an excellent draughtsman, the work oscillating between considered and spontaneous with exceptional sophistication. But more than this, the artist’s palette is itself visual poetry, fresh with surprises and bold injunctions. Working with an awareness of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’ (1901—5), his choices show a heightened sensitivity to the wordless invocations of a shade, how each can be sprung with unique associations. The year is 1901, the city is Paris, when Carles Casagemas calls a farewell dinner party for himself. Spurned when asking his love-interest Germaine Pichot for her hand in marriage, he shoots at her first before proceeding to commit suicide by a bullet to the temple. In the aftermath of his friend’s death, Picasso visibly sullens and subdues his use of colour, turning instead to the many dispositions of blue. ‘Blue protects white from innocence / Blue drags black with it / Blue is darkness made visible’.[3] Blue is everything from the impoverished wisp of a memory, the down-and-out, the brittle cold, a touch of melancholy, the claustral depths of depression. Streaked with blue, is the silent scream of grief. 

Sanya Kantarovsky, On Them, 2019. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA

 On Them (2019) features an orange-clad figure strangling and suppressing someone beneath him. Straining while looking someplace beyond the picture frame, he rallies against the heavens, daring the Godlessly silent sky to exact divine retribution upon him. Commotion is everywhere in the bleeding colour that conjoin their torsos and limbs. The confused force and resistance foretell an exchange: a fated entanglement. So too, thinks the tragic darling of Salome II (2020) from the New Testament; tentacular legs billowing beneath her, she gazes into the face of John the Baptist’s decapitated head, her own lit like the moon. Despite the parsimony, we see in hers the illuminated, gaunt face of histories past, one Picasso famously ascribes to himself in Self-Portrait (1901). There is intellectual value to cruelty and suffering, we like to think. And that, too, is a muddied hue of dry-brushed blue. In Kantarovsky’s words, beautifully summed, On Them is a painting with ‘so much gravity and very little specificity’.[4] The same might be said for Salome II (2020) which, without the weight of its title, relishes in a criminally exquisite scantness, recognisably his.

Left: Sanya Kantarovsky, Salome II, 2020. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA.

Right: Pablo Picasso, Self-portrait, 1901. © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Musée Picasso Paris.

  
These tenacious characters survive a lot of blue. They anyway cannot but survive the invulnerability of their universes. What must ‘forever’ mean to those who do not have time? What they possess of human qualities is sordid and merciless, while for their unearthliness, they seem to acknowledge a certain burden of lightness. Sheer impossibility. Tender swells; the contemplative pause in the fact of murder. Their sinister qualities are palpable to their lack of self-deception, they do not live in any doubt of their evil acts. (But what is evil, anyway, in the cartoon cosmology of immortality and recursivity?) The loss of humanity amplifies what little humanity there may still be left to salvage. Tiny inflections of hope or redemption here produce that bittersweetness of ‘tender-yet-cruel’. 

A broad range of techniques in his arsenal, Kantarovsky works to outcomes so varied, parts risk being mistaken for the work of different painters. That, compounded with the multitudinous source material from which he draws — wrung from art history, literature, film — speaks to ‘the problem of worlds - of contact between incommensurable worlds... [which] brings us once again to the heart of the weird’.[5] The weird as a sort of transgressive slurry, an aberrant pastiche. It is this polyphonic assemblage that, in its obfuscation of singular or grand meanings, also permits a certain amoral grotesquerie about the pictures. If, as Susan Sontag suggests, we rely on politics to read violence into images [6] — who’s good, who’s evil and, perhaps then, what’s unjust — the absence of politics is maybe most pronounced in Examination (2020), wherein Kantarovsky leaves us with the moral bankruptcy and arbitrariness of these positions. Positions amplified by the imposing stances of two men whose enormity is emphasized by the crop, between which lies a defenceless squiggle, an emaciated, topless blue man. Positions which, for all they are, in simple contradistinction, are just positions. 

Left: Sanya Kantarvosky, Examination, 2020. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA.

Right: Sanya Kantarovsky, Mutualism II, 2020. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA.

   
The artist handles the production of tension without contrivance, by deploying moments of slowed, disarticulated shape-shifting; the childish illustration of Salome set within an intensely macabre scene, the perpetrator fused to his victim, a sinewy adult folded over in foetal position. This idea also takes visual incarnation in Mutualism II (2020) — the title of one of Kantarovsky’s paintings, but also a term for the symbiotic relationship between two or more species, in which each receives net benefits. A baby-bodied creature with an elderly face, like something of a Japanese ghost story, eagerly latches on the arm of his ‘host’, teeth bared. Her normalisation, even encouragement, of the act strongly invokes the maternal impulse to feed. I read an interview in which the artist invokes ostranenija, which translates to ‘making strange’ or ‘defamiliarization’ in Russian, and was a distinct strategy of its avant-garde.[7] This liminal space, a twilight, was described by the late Mark Fisher as one that ‘de-realises the factual and real-ises the fictional’.[8]

Sanya Kantarovsky, Beach, 2019. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA.

Flickering. For blue is the colour of midnight, the cosmic, the elsewhere, the dream; but also essential, indivisible and elemental, which speaks to its myriad forms in terrestrial nature. The paintings behave as does the immediacy of a stubborn dream, clinging to the day. ‘Blue stretches, yawns and is awake.’[9] A sense of a ‘giving over’ to natural and preternatural forces underlies the surficial ongoings of many of the paintings, as their protagonists grow estranged to the point of becoming radically altered themselves. In romantic but solemn Beach (2019) an elegant perspectival tilt flattens the picture plane — viewer becomes watcher of the hour, from an easily imagined ledge or shelf just beyond the mauve-wet sandy stretch. A woman is suspended mid-air, the breathy, swirling of the composition inviting rhythm, near-audible music. Something is amiss, however: by mere dint of lifting the woman, the tail of her dress behaves as a ghostly emanation, her face a goblin green. This dance seems to whip up a frenetic invisible energy, piquing the curiosity of the dog (dogs always know). Who does he think she is? Does he sweep her off her feet, or does she slip away just as he holds her? 

Left: Sanya Kantarovsky, As ye sow, so shall ye reap, 2020. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA

Right: Pablo Picasso, La Maternité, 1901. © Estate of Pablo Picasso / The National Gallery, London.

  ‘I have walked behind the sky. / For what are you seeking? / The fathomless blue of Bliss.’[10] As though mid-way through a happy gallivant, a man in crazed rhapsody seizes upon an oversized red flower and holding it above him, lovingly addresses it. Exaggeration has the work ringing with madness, from the saccharine toxicity of the colours to his twisted smiling, in the foreground a fleshless forearm stripped down to the bone. The painting’s title As ye sow, so ye shall reap (2020) is an idiom which causally links action and consequence, and is a moralistic reading of mutualism. Its milky pallor and daytime blues, with sun-washed limes and lashings of red, distinctly reminisces Picasso’s La Maternité (1901). Note the supernaturally long fingers that serve her child-cradling hand. Cradled also is the existentially exhausted blue man-child of Alma (2018), whose title, from ‘alma mater’, is the Latin word for ‘nourishing’. In this work however, the hush-blue man-child exceeds his mother’s hands and fills the bathtub which, from bird’s eye perspective, behaves both as womb, as cot and as grave. 

Sanya Kantarvosky, Alma, 2018. © Sanya Kantarovsky. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York, USA.

 That enigmatic charge of colour and its vicissitudes have been the uncertain science of many an artist and educator; take for example David Batchelor’s Chromophobia (2000), which argues that ‘a fear of contamination and corruption’ by colour is a long-standing affair, and still operant in the contemporary psyche; or the illustrated studies of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Colour (1963); or spliced through this text, the chapter ‘Into the Blue’ from Derek Jarman’s Chroma (1994) — an assiduous dedication to colour written in the twilight of blindness, as the artist succumbs to AIDS-related health complications. The blues remind you, with a twinge of pain and a pang of self-consciousness, of things you no longer expect to feel in a gallery. Your mouth waters. It’s not art theory, it’s not directly addressable; feelings like questions are immanent, before being called to a name. Able to amplify or temper the malign instincts of the characters and their dealings through a versatile use of blues, we see the artist here as master colourist. 

The room rearranges itself if we break the fourth wall. ‘The artist as an actor in his own play,’[11] as Kantarovsky has said. As with the his new solo show ‘The House of the Spider’ at Stuart Shave Modern Art, London, we occasionally glean the artist among his motley crew of characters. We sense the marred threshold of sincerity which becomes them. This may be why, in their endless hurtle towards a denatured destiny, we commend the endurance and perseverance of these painted figures; their plight at once feels uncannily our own. Empathy as fated entanglement. ‘The shattering bright light of the eye specialist’s camera leaves the empty sky-blue after-image.’[12] Specific tones of blue — carriers of innumerable states and secrets — speak to artworks of the future-past. Stories are not spoken but retold through the undecided trace which cannot be peeled from the present, but lives within it, transforming it. Always on the other side of time, the trace here is colour’s unshakeable longing for the depersonalised past — a haunting with which we confer or transact. Are you swept, do you slip, away? Left rehearsing a star-bound glissando, ‘I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.’[13]

[1] Derek Jarman, ‘Into the Blue’, Chroma (New York: Vintage Publishing, 1994), 108. 

[2] Jason Rosenfeld, ‘Sanya Kantarovsky In Conversation’, Brooklyn Rail (online), 15 June 2019. https://brooklynrail.org/2019/06/art/SANYA-KANTAROVSKY-with-Jason-Rosenfeld

[3] Jarman, Chroma, 114.

[4] Rosenfeld, Brooklyn Rail.

[5] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 28.

[6] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Picador, 2003). 

[7] Rosenfeld, Brooklyn Rail. 

[8] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 24. 

[9] Jarman, Chroma, 111.

[10] Ibid, 115. 

[11] Rosenfeld, Brooklyn Rail.  

[12] Jarman, Chroma, 123. 


[13] Ibid, 124