"Predicaments: Barry Schwabsky on the Art of Sanya Kantarovsky"

SANYA KANTAROVSKY is quintessentially a painter—someone who lives and breathes the materials, procedures, and heritage of the art. He’s someone who, according to the curator Elena Filipovic, “believes more in the utter necessity of painting than nearly anyone I’ve ever met.” So it might seem counterintuitive that his first American museum exhibition, which opened this past month at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, will be a video installation—no canvases in evidence.

But no one who knows the artist would be entirely surprised. Yes, Kantarovsky is a painter, and passionately so, but his very passion is what makes him cast such a severe eye on so much of the painting he sees—and, implicitly, on his own. Others may speak of faith in painting. Not Kantarovsky. True, he’s not part of that tribe of Krebberite anti-painters. But he paints out of a suspicion or skepticism of painting, perhaps a diffidence, which can involve a not-always-convincing self-distrust: “My work, at least in my eyes,” Kantarovsky once claimed, “is predicated on the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing.” To my eye, in fact, his paintings look like the product of someone with consummate craft, and if they can sometimes be compositionally awkward, they are always consciously so: Their awkwardness, in other words, is not necessarily deliberate, but is accepted as a necessity given the awkwardness of the feelings the paintings are built to carry. Although the feelings encapsulated in the paintings do not fall into any of the specific categories analyzed by Sianne Ngai in her 2005 book Ugly Feelings, Kantarovsky’s work has something in common with Ngai’s in that, like her, he “approaches emotions as unusually knotted or condensed ‘interpretations of predicaments’—that is, signs that not only render visible different registers of problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) but conjoin these problems in a distinctive manner.” The paintings take an analytical detachment from the disquiet they express, but that detachment does not entirely defend them against being caught up in that disquiet.

Read full article on artforum.com