Sanya Kantarovsky - Center

Sanya Kantarovsky
Center
28 April - 11 June 2022

Capitain Petzel is pleased to present Center, an exhibition of paintings by Sanya Kantarovsky, made in 2021 and the first third of 2022.
  Responding directly to the Soviet era modernist architecture of Kunst im Heim, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, Kantarovsky alters the space with a symmetrical arrangement of walls that evoke both religious architecture and anatomical symmetry.
  This intervention sets the stage for motifs of anatomy, biology and spirituality that recur throughout the paintings. The title work, Center, presents a human organ system floating in space. The brain, perched on top of the esophagus, has a face with a look of concentration. Invoking the Qigong practice of visualizing one’s organs smiling, this brain seems able only to manifest his own belabored expression.
  In Wordly Concerns (Milarepa), the Tibetan saint and murderer who attained redemption through Buddhist practice is pictured in his typical repose, with his right hand pressed against his ear, listening to the universe. In contrast, Lear presents the Shakespearean antihero, a victim of the ego, in a state of disconnection, with his crown slipping from his hidden hand. Growth presents a humanoid mushroom stretching enthusiastically upwards, set against a backdrop of meandering capillaries, veins and bowels – the hidden apparatus of life.
  In Return a female figure gazes at an organ system that appears to have slithered into her lap, evoking images of the prodigal son’s return to the father. Throughout the paintings, figures in various states of decomposition and / or regeneration appear to dissolve into space and material, their corporeality bearing a spectral, impermanent quality. Art historical precedents reverberate throughout the surfaces, such as De Chirico’s late classicism in Spirits, or Van Gogh’s saturated impasto in Pumpkin.
  Housed in the auxiliary galleries is a presentation of monotype prints created with the artist‘s long-time print-making collaborator Marina Ancona at 10 Grand Press. These prints lay bare the process of conjuring images through the re-working of “ghosts” – building on the residue of previously painted images on the plate. Functioning as both preliminary ideas and reflections on the paintings in the exhibition, the prints oer a dierent register of seeing, hinging on the indexical slippage between paper and acrylic glass.
  The viewer is invited into a synesthesia in which the realms of experience, thought, form and materiality are violated, overlapped and disordered. The notion of self is fragmented in both object and image. Locating one’s center, the commonly proclaimed goal of Western contemporary wellness and self-help literature, is demonstratively absent. There is no center.