In Sanya Kantarovsky’s current show at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery, a haunting collection of fifteen humanoid faces unsettles the viewer by provoking an unexpected identification when he discovers within them some trace of himself. 

Walking through the gallery space for the first time, the viewer traverses the exhibition as if being led through a dystopian wasteland. These faces, caught in various stages of decay, with their sallow skin and hanging eyes, are marked by suffering. The figures, in a single cortège, seem to mourn some irrecoverable, unspeakable loss. In Face 4, an ancient man, with lifeless purple discs for eyes, grasps a bouquet of white flowers, as if to mourn some death — perhaps his own. For this eternal face is suspended between life and death. This face maintains itself in death. This flayed, maroon visage disintegrates before our eyes only to reveal a green infection spreading over its features. In many of Kantarovsky’s Faces, the body is similarly coming apart, exploding in mutiny against the mind. The dejected schoolboy, we can imagine, in Face 8 scowls at the ground as if to curse his fate. Kantarovsky renders this boy’s face in swirling strokes of sickly acid green, and he has in fact added alcohol to his paint in order to thin it out, which creates the visual effect that the boy’s face is dissolving, having been corroded by the alcohol. In many of the paintings, Kantarovsky’s masterful handling of paint suggests this dissolution of the body. In Face 9 — one of the most hauntingly beautiful Faces of the show — it seems that Kantarovsky has frantically scratched the canvas, perhaps with a pencil, almost as if to claw out this figure’s eyes. The paint and the face are left scarred. In this way, Kantarovsky maims the paint itself; that is, he contests his own medium of representation. He disarms it in a way that recalls Rembrandt’s late, or sometimes-called ‘dirty’, style. In a work such as Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, Rembrandt’s loose handling of paint leaves the subject’s face gnarled. In this portrait, Rembrandt infuses the paint with death in the same way as Kantarovsky. For both artists, paint, as a medium which usually promises the immortality of a representation, instead conveys the frailty of an image that assaults its own sovereignty. Kantarovsky’s paintings do not idealize, nor do they immortalize as a portrait typically does. In fact, these are not portraits at all. These are ‘faces’ of despair that cower in the face of representational annihilation.

Kantarovsky’s application of paint suggests the fragility of his subjects, who seem to hover precariously on the surface of the canvas, always on the verge of disappearing, metamorphosing, or dying. In Face 15, the young boy liquefies, merging with the background; in Face 1 and Face 10, these insectile, Modigliani-esque faces seem to be caught in the middle of Kafka’s dreadful metamorphosis; in Face 12, which is the very look of despair, a black skeletal figure sinks into shadow. However, in every face, despite their differences, we notice an incurable fatigue, a boundless melancholy, a resignation unto death. Even in Face 13, which is one of the most traditionally ‘beautiful’ of the bunch, we notice, as her nose quietly bleeds, that this beauty is fragile — that death infiltrates every instance of beauty. In Kantarovsky’s Faces, there is always this sense of an impending danger. One of the most explicit examples of this is in Face 5, which depicts the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (in the foreground) and the man who killed him in a duel, Georges d’Anthès. Rendered in winding, vaporous brushstrokes, Pushkin becomes a shade of the underworld, and we sense in his somber expression an awareness of his own imminent death. In all these paintings, some external threat erupts into the world of the canvas, which manifests in a drop of blood, a welled-up tear, a domineering hand, a sidelong glance. Some unseen force continuously torments these subjects. The viewer is aware that some misfortune has just happened, is about to happen, or perhaps will always be happening as some Tartarean punishment. We might then say that these faces recognize their own fate, as Pushkin seems to. They recognize their own weakness in the face of the world. If Kantarovsky believes that “Embarrassment and discomfort are a great place for a painting to exist,” [1] these figures then seem to exhibit an acute self-consciousness. In some way, they recognize their own mortality. As Cocteau famously said, “Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.” In shame, these figures are confronted with the certainty of their own disappearance.

It is easy to read these figures as outcasts, a freakshow, and it is even easier to back away from their misshapen, often repulsive, faces. However, if we force ourselves to look a little longer, we may begin to see a likeness in these figures. All of a sudden, these alien masks become mysteriously familiar, as if we have glimpsed them in dreams. Perhaps we are reminded of someone from our past. Or maybe we even recognize in these faces our own infirmity, our own ugliness. By working on a small, human scale, Kantarovsky provokes such an identification with these figures, who confront the viewer as spectral reflections. Before these images, we experience that ultimate sensation of alterity, in which we see ourselves as some repulsive other — in which we are disgusted by our own corporeality, our deficient body. However, this unsettling identification is not necessarily a hopeless realization that death inevitably infects life. Rather, these figures, who are defiant in spite of their weakness or their ugliness, provoke a recognition of the fact that death corrodes life, just as life, at the height of death, perfects the corrosion that destroys it. We can read such a defiance in the weariness of these faces. Camus writes that “Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.” Thus, if it is true that these faces are marked by disaster, these faces are not so much burdened by a disaster within the external world but by the disaster of the world itself. They are marked by the disaster that is inaugurated by knowledge itself. However, the terror of this realization is also the gift of consciousness, without which all would be lost. For Camus, the question which consciousness provokes is whether or not to continue living in spite of everything, in spite of the world. At certain points, Kantarovsky’s Faces seem to waver between life and death, revolt and renunciation. However, in the final painting of the show, the young boy, who resists the hand which oppresses him, chooses to endure as he affirms a life invaded by death. In this act of defiance, we discern an exuberance for life — for the impossible.  // 

“Recent Faces” is open at Luhring Augustine Tribeca through June 12, 2021.

NOTES

[1] Sanya Kantarovsky in Robin Cembalest, Sanya Kantarovsky’s Literary Drive. W Magazine, April 30, 2015.