Sanya Kantarovsky at Taka Ishii Gallery

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There is occasional painterly comedy - the necronomic fingers of Schiele's corpse hands grasping the blemishless lithe expanse of a Frankenthaler's body. Or, the melting visage of some cortical homunculus, melting into a warm goo, not what the critics call drawing but a pleasure centering painting... The cartoon is often muddled by the wanton perfume of the paint. The long sinuous line stretching Kantarovsky's whole career has been made much of, typographic elegance, his cartoonists wit - though wish we could just have the drawings to prove it, since this seems a reviewer's fundamental misunderstanding of what is so enviable about cartoons, their lack of painterlyness - but Kantarovsky has always convoluted painting and drawing, the sleight of hand: having one, a fondling grope of the other. 

Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art

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Artists engaging in traditional crafts, marquetry and woodblock. But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. And these are two artists who's importance is the plasticity of style - the sort of whatever possibility of plastic goos, bent for artistic purposing. New images in old habits. So it's odd then to have a press release calling the whole thing into question, a excerpt from a 1906 book of traditional wood crafts lamenting novelty:

"If there is one quality which more than another marks the demand of the present day it is the requirement of novelty. ...the question is not, 'Is this fresh thing good? Is it well-fitted for its intended uses?' but 'Is it novel?' ... dispens[ing] with tradition, and ... set forth with childlike naïveté. Careful study of these experiments discloses the fact that .... the undigested use of natural motifs results not in nourishment but in nightmare"

This would all depend on whether we believe this art to be "undigested designs indifferently executed which have little but a fancied novelty to recommend them.” Not a "...a saner view of what constitutes originality by setting before them something of the experience of past times, when craft tradition was still living and the designer had a closer contact with the material in which his design was carried out than is usual at present." Surely this is not today. But there's something I'm not willing to throw away with the show. Somehow its uselessness seems the point, an abuse of interest. 

see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Camille Blatrix at Wattis

Sanya Kantarovsky at Kunsthalle Basel

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10 images. Of which 7 installation views, 2 photos of paintings on walls straight, and one promotional still from a movie yet to play. Kunsthalle Basel has always been pretty miserly with their images, but this is a new low. The old low is 11 images acting as documentation but mainly just letting you know it happened through the window you have your faced pressed up to look in on. They come in a packet on the website marked "Press images." Like we've glued our lips to promotional pamphlets.


see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin,

“Sputterances” at Metro Pictures

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No myth that curators are beholden to a "conversation," one that manifests by reinscribing and working around the general pool of artists we see commonly. Curators show certain art/artists to prove (and thus renew) their access to the structure that legitimates them. Reciprocal legitimization by no single curatorial/artist node but instead the conversational majority, arranging consensus by those delegates already given authority, e.g. curators, institutions. Access starts to look like legitimacy. This insight why CAD took off. Read Sanchez's "Contemporary Art, Daily."  This why we see artists/exhibitions in triplicate, the same ones proffered around the globe. You proffer 3 givens, and one unknown.  And so maybe artists make more enjoyable curators because they're freed from the profession's need to prove the contemporaneousness of the vision, you get something a bit more idiosyncratic, interesting.

“No Joke” at Tanya Leighton

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Humor as Trojan delivery vehicle, its content entering us sub-defenses allowing incongruity recognized to bubble forth in laughter, put forth as palliative to the surrealist contemporary, and cartoons which act as Icons for the human dispossessed of their reality's physicality, this show could be thought of as more than just a list of Kantarovsky's references.

See too:  Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center, Allison Katz at BFA Boatos, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art+Jonathan Viner

Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx

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“‘Stylization’ is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does make the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form. When that happens, when style and subject are so distinguished, that is, played off against each other, one can legitimately speak of subjects being treated (or mistreated) in a certain style.”(Sontag)

It would seem this sentence already feels antiquated, painting today prerequistely stylized with the past worn as its own sleeve. There isn’t a painting today not “stylized” with its own past instance, that doesn’t dress itself in it.  Kantarovsky doesn’t treat style as symbolic fashion to be worn, but merely the water one swims in today, the status quo for an art submerged in the redirection of flows of “content.”  That some could be mistaken for a Kai Althoff matters less than none, the difference is ideological, one cold one warm. Interesting now to see this show finding a child illustration-like pathos within it. The thin veil of the press release decoded with a simple substitution cipher, the enigma revealed:

“Surrounded by a chewy gelatinous sugar coating[...]Laden with [painting] history, [Kantarovsky] is burdened as well with the impossible task of conveying sweetness in a largely bitter and disenchanted world, a world overwhelmed with familiar pictures of unfamiliar people. Each [painting] packs a memory of itself, staining the tongue with streaks of saturated color, issuing a syrupy nostalgia for [?] itself—abated only by the hope that some still remain in the pack.”