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.

Why am I reading Franz Kafka’s diary? Not that I’m really reading it—but for those with better German, it won’t be difficult to parse the lively script strafing the pages of about four dozen of the writer’s notebooks, journals, letters, and postcards currently on view at the Morgan Library.