Sanya kantarovsky biography of william hill

Sanya Kantarovsky works across the fields of film, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and curating, with painting at the centre of his practice. His approach to painting is iterative and intuitive, working through successive versions of a motif, with a layered process of addition and erasure. In painting especially, Kantarovsky’s surfaces can take on various forms, ranging from evaporated pools of solvent and paint to thick impasto or chalky flatness, reminiscent of fresco or clay. These mediated processes serve to widen the gap between the hand and the surface, obscuring technique.

His subject matter is borne of a meandering line of inquiry that engages with historical practices of painters, writers, or even choreographers. This throughline finds its way across the artist’s own lived experience, leaning on a wide range of dissonant philosophical, political, and spiritual conventions around the human subject.

The effect of the artist’s scenes is often one of overidentification between a represented body, the painter, and the viewer. Feelings of compassion or revulsion are often marked by humour, while scenes of harm or cruelty may be marked by desire. A familiar saying: behind every fear is a wish. There is a certain kernel of ambivalence that seems to precede the way Kantarovs

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