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拍品專文
In Charnal Field, Sanya Kantarovsky offers a meditative scene of sublime beauty. A six-foot-tall memento mori, the present work lingers on a form whose soul seems to be floating above it. The desolate landscape, which evokes the masterful and evocative touch of Edvard Munch, is not all dark. Instead, glimpses of yellow come through, perhaps signaling the approaching dawn. Ghostly mushrooms rise from the soil and signal new life within death. The canvas’s title illustrates this paradox. A “charnel house” refers to a building where skeletons are stored, which was a common practice in Catholicism before the Reformation. Kantarovsky’s spelling suggests a darkly humorous combination of “charnel” and “carnal.” Perhaps he refers here to the opulence and sensuality of vanitas paintings throughout history, such as Georges de La Tour’s Magdalene with Two Flames (c. 1640).
In Charnal Field, Kantarovsky puts his unique style on display. The skeleton, with its strange and otherworldly features, resembles a cartoon without any of the cheap humor. Kantarovsky recalls, “I look to the language of cartoons because I love how many liberties you can take with a cartoon body. A cartoon body can really turn into more of an idea, and its correlation to the real world can become unstable and interesting, offering possibility” (S. Kantarovsky, quoted in M. Coomer, “Sanya Kantarovsky,” Time Out, May 25, 2015). The body in Charnal Field is part of a mysterious narrative that is divorced from the world we know. Still, the familiarity of Kantarovsky’s landscape painting also grounds us in art history, indeed, a totally new art history. As critic Barry Schwabsky writes of Kantarovsky, “His paintings look like the product of someone with consummate craft, and if they can sometimes be compositionally awkward, they are always consciously so” (B. Schwabsky, “Predicaments: Barry Schwabsky on the Art of Sanya Kantarovsky,” Artforum, January 2023).
Kantarovsky cites Vincent van Gogh’s Prisoners’ Round (after Gustave Doré) (1890) as a formative painting, and it is a perfect comparison to Charnal Field. Van Gogh’s painting has similarly swirling brushstrokes and creates a foreboding mood. Prisoners’ Round was displayed during van Gogh’s funeral, and therefore also operates as a memento mori. Yet within dark subject matter, the evocative power of paint shines through and reminds us of its unique capacity to capture the human condition. In this vein, the director and chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel Elena Filipovic has said of Kantarovsky that he “believes more in the utter necessity of painting than nearly anyone I’ve ever met” (E. Filipovic, quoted in B. Schwabsky, “Predicaments: Barry Schwabsky on the Art of Sanya Kantarovsky,” Artforum, January 2023).
Recent solo exhibitions include the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2018) and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2017-2018). His work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Tate London.
Kantarovsky’s influence is evinced by the increased interest in representational painting that has reinvigorated the medium for the twenty-first century. Charnal Field is exemplary of his urge to push the boundaries of what contemporary painting can and should express. Though it appears at first to be a Baroque or Gothic throwback, the artist’s use of specific imagery and judicious color choices engender something entirely his own. As with all great vanitas paintings, Charnal Field is a reminder of mortality that uses exquisite metaphors rather than an easily legible narrative. It is an opaque painting, and purposefully so, which allows us to consider the brevity of our own lives.
In Charnal Field, Kantarovsky puts his unique style on display. The skeleton, with its strange and otherworldly features, resembles a cartoon without any of the cheap humor. Kantarovsky recalls, “I look to the language of cartoons because I love how many liberties you can take with a cartoon body. A cartoon body can really turn into more of an idea, and its correlation to the real world can become unstable and interesting, offering possibility” (S. Kantarovsky, quoted in M. Coomer, “Sanya Kantarovsky,” Time Out, May 25, 2015). The body in Charnal Field is part of a mysterious narrative that is divorced from the world we know. Still, the familiarity of Kantarovsky’s landscape painting also grounds us in art history, indeed, a totally new art history. As critic Barry Schwabsky writes of Kantarovsky, “His paintings look like the product of someone with consummate craft, and if they can sometimes be compositionally awkward, they are always consciously so” (B. Schwabsky, “Predicaments: Barry Schwabsky on the Art of Sanya Kantarovsky,” Artforum, January 2023).
Kantarovsky cites Vincent van Gogh’s Prisoners’ Round (after Gustave Doré) (1890) as a formative painting, and it is a perfect comparison to Charnal Field. Van Gogh’s painting has similarly swirling brushstrokes and creates a foreboding mood. Prisoners’ Round was displayed during van Gogh’s funeral, and therefore also operates as a memento mori. Yet within dark subject matter, the evocative power of paint shines through and reminds us of its unique capacity to capture the human condition. In this vein, the director and chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel Elena Filipovic has said of Kantarovsky that he “believes more in the utter necessity of painting than nearly anyone I’ve ever met” (E. Filipovic, quoted in B. Schwabsky, “Predicaments: Barry Schwabsky on the Art of Sanya Kantarovsky,” Artforum, January 2023).
Recent solo exhibitions include the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2018) and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2017-2018). His work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Tate London.
Kantarovsky’s influence is evinced by the increased interest in representational painting that has reinvigorated the medium for the twenty-first century. Charnal Field is exemplary of his urge to push the boundaries of what contemporary painting can and should express. Though it appears at first to be a Baroque or Gothic throwback, the artist’s use of specific imagery and judicious color choices engender something entirely his own. As with all great vanitas paintings, Charnal Field is a reminder of mortality that uses exquisite metaphors rather than an easily legible narrative. It is an opaque painting, and purposefully so, which allows us to consider the brevity of our own lives.