Sanya Kantarovsky’s paintings are at odds with themselves, which is what makes them memorable (and why it’s appropriate that a psychoanalyst contributed the first essay of his most recent monograph, Selected Works 2010–2024). Scarecrow, the show of (mostly) paintings spread across Michael Werner’s two locations, is rife with that tension, sometimes between pairs of compelling/repelling figures, as in the distant bedfellows of Cold (2025), sometimes within a single figure whose body is being or doing something strange, as in the anatomically screwy Scarecrow and Scarecrow II (both 2025), who have egg-sac hearts and no other organs. Elsewhere, the tension is orchestrated explicitly between the work and the viewer, as in Stage (Watteau) (2025), a painting in which Kantarovsky isolates Watteau’s white-clad Pierrot, the sad clown of Commedia dell’arte, removing the other actors depicted in the original painting and leaving him only a rabbit head for company. The clown stares out in a kind of tortured, idiotic bliss; the wary rabbit head side-eyes us skeptically. “What are we doing here,” said a friend who saw the show with me, meaning the question in every possible sense. Fair enough: Barry Schwabsky, writing about Kantarovsky for Artforum in 2023, notes that in Kantarovsky’s paintings, installations, and video work, “the question of meaning is tossed back to the viewer with aggressive nonchalance.”
