Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, November 12, 2021: Sanya Kantarovsky, a Russian emerging painter (#1416)

Sanya Kantarovsky’s paintings feature sinewy, morose figures who pose alone or congregate in groups against abstract and surreal backdrops. Dry humor and existential angst infuse his colorful scenes, which have alternately focused on lovers, mothers, children, and strangers. The artist takes inspiration from cartoons, folk tales, Eastern European aesthetics, and fine artists including Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and the Surrealists. Kantarovsky studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and worked for ad agencies before receiving his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since then, he’s exhibited in New York, Berlin, London, and beyond. His work has sold for six figures at auction and has been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions. Kantarovsky has also produced sculpture and animation, and curated shows of his own.

Sanya Kantarovsky has just finished a painting. He tells that the night before, he had been struggling with a piece he’d been working on for two weeks, and then, all of a sudden, around 4:00 a.m., he had a breakthrough. He painted over it and made a new one. It’s called Bud 5, and it shows a distressed man—one oversize hand held out in a “stop” gesture, the other pointing a pistol at the ceiling. “Bud” is R. Budd Dwyer, Pennsylvania’s state treasurer in the 1980s, who was convicted on bribery charges and shot himself in the mouth at a televised news conference. Kantarovsky, 37, was too young to be aware of the news at the time, but a friend later told him about the incident, and he watched the suicide on YouTube. His painting is based on a photograph of Budd that became famous in the aftermath of this death, in which he is reaching out to calm the bystanders who panicked when he pulled out the gun. “I love the contradiction of this guarding, tender, safekeeping gesture,” he says, “while he wields an instrument of death.”

Kantarovsky, black-haired and soft-spoken, is a storyteller whose stories resonate with dark humor and unearthly situations. A wild patchwork of influences runs through his work—surrealism and symbolism; Gauguin, Chagall, Ensor, Matisse, and Blue Period Picasso; also folktales and cartoons and children’s books; figuration and abstraction. The offbeat comedy of his work does not resemble what you find in Roy Lichtenstein and Philip Guston, or in Carroll Dunham, George Condo, Lisa Yuskavage, or any number of other contemporary artists. Kantarovsky’s humor doesn’t make you laugh out loud. It’s rooted in Russian and Eastern European aesthetics, the corrosive, embarrassing, upside-down, melancholy strain that you find in Kafka, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (Kantarovsky’s favorite novel), and, for that matter, in the early–twentieth century Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil. “Humor is central to my work,” he says. (The title of the only monograph on his work so far is No Joke.) “Art has never been about morality or about the pure and clean and correct. It’s always been about the grime and pain and totally unfair contradictions of being alive—and humor, very much so, is a kind of pressure valve.”

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