A Solid House, 2022, installation view. Photo: Carter Seddon. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum
A Solid House at Aspen Art Museum explores, in a rare video installation, the ways in which external phenomena dictate our lives
Sanya Kantarovsky is best known for his paintings, which tap into the cruelty and contradiction of everyday life with cartoonish types that become screens for our own pathetic and shameful projections. This show’s only work, a rare video installation from Kantarovsky, revolves around a monkey-like protagonist who has a fixation with another type of painting: Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793). David’s canvas famously made a martyr of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical French politician who was murdered in his bath. A Solid House (2022) opens by panning over a printed reproduction of the painting, which is awash with the creature’s fingerprints.
A Solid House explores, a bit circuitously, the ways in which we obsessively align ourselves with external phenomena – flattering images, tasteful objects, laudable ideologies – that declare us to be wholly just, disciplined, cultivated or good: an ego-driven undertaking that is absurd in light of reality’s complexities and incongruities. Museumgoers follow a path of battery-operated tea lights in a dark enclave to a preposterously long couch. From there, they encounter the 12-minute video, which intercuts 16mm film depicting tranquil nature scenes with h d video of a bourgeois home with aspirational trappings such as luxury-brand candles and coffee-table books. Its lone occupant, a hirsute computer-generated simian, eats a hard-boiled egg, runs his finger along a water glass’s rim and presses his snub nose against the window.
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