The Brooklyn Rail

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.”

Scarecrow is the first show at Michael Werner since the Upper East Side gallery expanded to a second space, and for reasons of subway adjacency as well as narrative, it makes sense to begin at the newer location, on the fourth floor of 1018 Madison Avenue (worth a return trip to the building are Madeline Peckenpaugh’s cosmic, semi-abstracted landscapes one floor below, at Alexander Berggruen). This portion of the show is mostly given over to images of Hera, a white Whippet, identified in the press release as the dog of Kantarovsky’s friends Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood. In the large oil painting Under the Tree (Matisse) (2025), Kantarovsky paints Hera a bit like an angular, elegant fawn, true to the way racing dogs resemble other animals depending on the angle, or maybe to the way all animals resemble others in certain attitudes. In the painting and the three smaller monotypes (Hera in the Grass I–III [all 2025]), as well as a stoneware piece (Hera Vessel [2025]) Hera lives in the landscape, making her way through stretches and dabs of color, looking at something, inquisitive; in the smaller painting simply titled Hera (2025), she’s dead. The viewer sees her from above, a form at the bottom of a dark box filled with flowers, something closer to skeletal, more like a ram or lamb, organic matter and archetype. Across the room hangs the smaller of the two scarecrows, Scarecrow II (2025), a monotype of a man with bulging eyes and a visible spine-like (or visceral? vagal?) stripe running down his elongated pink torso.

If it’s not yet entirely clear what to make of the two strands here—the abject scarecrow willfully on display, the seemingly guileless mortal animal—after a short walk to the original Werner space at 4 East 77th Street, the show gathers force and crescendos. There, Pierrot shares the front room with Pearl (2025), an enigmatic painting in which one figure bends at the feet of another on a shoreline alive with Kantarovsky’s familiar mushroom-y growths. Then there’s Cold (2025), the uncommunicative couple in bed, a warm-toned figure turned away from both the viewer and its bedmate, a smaller, bluer figure stretched out beside (or maybe one is the emanation of the other?). Elsewhere are small portraits and images of spiders. And then, in a room toward the back, there’s the larger of the scarecrows, Scarecrow (2025), its looming body thinly swirled and striated with pinks and purples that read more as textile or prepared slide than flesh, yet inescapably implying crucifixion. There is, perhaps, a painted-over outline of a spider by the shoulder, certainly another egg for a heart, eyes staring somewhere slightly overhead. Kantarovsky, in the release, suggests that looking away is an indication of shame, and that “Maybe these painted bodies are extensions of my own fear of attracting visitors.” Clearly outlined, the bodies appear foggier, the brushstrokes looser and wilder upon closer approach, as though squirming at the prospect of being apprehended.

In the show’s final painting, Release (2025), the question of the averted gaze and the scarecrow’s embarrassing, never particularly efficacious self-display seems less pressing (not efficacious because smart birds quickly figure out the scarecrow’s trick—see the crow exploring some unfortunate’s nasal cavity in Exfiltration, 2021). Kantarovsky has spoken about his interest in the space of the exhibition, and here the townhouse layout simply works as well as it possibly can. Release (2025) hangs in the very back, in its own chamber. A shirtless male figure is lowering another, blue-mottled body into the water, its face turned down, arm half-skeletal (Kantarovsky started painting this skeleton-limb joke a few years ago—see As ye sow, so shall ye reap from 2020), something like a reverse baptism, a rinsing, a drowning, a burial at sea. Dawn breaks at upper left, or perhaps the light is receding.

What are we doing here? We might finally be free, here, from the mortifying desire to be looked at, freed by a death less violent than usual in Kantarovsky’s paintings, or by an opaque act that reads as ritualistic, if not religious. Kantarovsky is usually frank about his influences and references (Soviet satire, cartoons, Moscow, Henri Matisse, The Master and Margarita) and always eloquent in describing his relationship to them, and my interest in his work has come, in part, from a selfish wish to see how others are dealing with the material of late-Soviet childhood—the horrifying closeness of it all, the mordant humor, illustration raised to the degree of art, art raised to the degree of religion, and religion razed almost to nothing, an inchoate inclination. If, in this show, Hera’s death returns her to nature, the death of the human figure in Release (2025) is the next best thing: a dissolution, a final great equanimity regarding the question of being seen.

Part of Kantarovsky’s gift is that, like the really great filmmakers, he remakes the world in his image for a while. When I walked out of the show and into the street, I locked eyes with a baby gnawing on the leather handlebar of its stroller (see Mutualism, 2020), and we stared at each other until a balloon tied to a balustrade bopped me on the head (Petrol, 2018). I blinked. There was a man inexplicably taking off his shirt on the sidewalk. In a letter to his son Yves, John Berger wrote about Watteau’s Pierrot, Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles (1718-19), that “[his] body has no border because joke after joke has dissolved the body into a sky. His body is becoming a cloud. He is painted like a landscape.” Kantarovsky’s clown is intensely, all-consumingly self-conscious, and he turns the landscape into himself.