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Friday, June 16, 2023

Sanya Kantarovsky at Taka Ishii Gallery

(link)

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.