.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A dreamlike haze hangs over Sanya Kantarovsky’s The House of the Spider (2021), a large-scale vision that lands the viewer in a fantastical garden. Flowers and foliage bloom in complex variegations of colour and texture, conjured with oil paint and watercolour that approaches the condition of pastel. A waif-like figure with teeth bared, her hair dissolving into nebular fields of colour, is transfixed at the bottom left. Her eyes are locked on to the large purple flower—with eight spidery petals—that hangs down from the opposite corner. Between figure and flower floats a gleaming red orb, meticulously finished such that it appears to pop out of the painting like a jewel. Redolent of Odilon Redon’s Symbolist floral fantasies, the scene’s enigmatic drama is typical for the Moscow-born, New York-based Kantarovsky, whose obliquely comic, semi-scrutable painted parables are to be found in the collections of major institutions including the Whitney, Tate, the Hirshhorn and LACMA.
The House of the Spider refers to a Quranic maxim: ‘The likeness of those who have taken to them protectors, apart from God, is as the likeness of the spider that takes to itself a house; and surely the frailest of houses is the house of the spider, did they but know.’ It is an apt conceit for a painter whose works continually revel, with a dry humour drawn equally from Kafka and from comic books, in instability and transience. Born in 1982 in Moscow, Kantarovsky studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design before undertaking his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Obsessive about the material stuff of painting, he is also a voracious student and incisive theorist, qualities he pursues in curatorial and written work.
Kantarovsky is interested in the Russian formalist concept ostranenie, or ‘defamiliarisation’: the way in which art can make familiar things strange, and cause audiences to see the world differently. He has explained his desire to compose ‘narrative fragments that imply some sort of problem, the exact conditions of which are rarely available to the viewer’ (S. Kantarovsky in conversation with A. Katz, in Sanya Kantarovsky: No Joke, Cologne 2016). The House of the Spider heightens this sense of intrigue by positioning the viewer above the scene. Looking straight down, our gaze follows the path of the red orb as it casts a shadow on the figure’s forehead. What does she see that we cannot in the flower’s mouth? In The House of the Spider’s mysterious kingdom, it is perhaps no coincidence that its petals resemble eight dangling limbs.
The House of the Spider refers to a Quranic maxim: ‘The likeness of those who have taken to them protectors, apart from God, is as the likeness of the spider that takes to itself a house; and surely the frailest of houses is the house of the spider, did they but know.’ It is an apt conceit for a painter whose works continually revel, with a dry humour drawn equally from Kafka and from comic books, in instability and transience. Born in 1982 in Moscow, Kantarovsky studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design before undertaking his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Obsessive about the material stuff of painting, he is also a voracious student and incisive theorist, qualities he pursues in curatorial and written work.
Kantarovsky is interested in the Russian formalist concept ostranenie, or ‘defamiliarisation’: the way in which art can make familiar things strange, and cause audiences to see the world differently. He has explained his desire to compose ‘narrative fragments that imply some sort of problem, the exact conditions of which are rarely available to the viewer’ (S. Kantarovsky in conversation with A. Katz, in Sanya Kantarovsky: No Joke, Cologne 2016). The House of the Spider heightens this sense of intrigue by positioning the viewer above the scene. Looking straight down, our gaze follows the path of the red orb as it casts a shadow on the figure’s forehead. What does she see that we cannot in the flower’s mouth? In The House of the Spider’s mysterious kingdom, it is perhaps no coincidence that its petals resemble eight dangling limbs.