December 20, 2015 |
It was impossible not to be thoroughly bewitched by Apricot Juice, the London debut of the Moscow-born, New York-based rising art star Sanya Kantarovsky was held at Studio Voltaire gallery earlier this year. That the original seducer, Satan, as envisaged in Bulgakov’s surreal satire of 1930s Moscow’s intellectual elite, The Master and Margarita, was the presiding magician in these lusciously hued, at times extravagantly sexy paintings was no surprise.
For Kantarovsky, who first read the book as a 10-year-old in Russia, “Its vivid characters and, as a friend recently put it, ‘lit-up’ language have informed my mind’s eye over a long time. I’ve always wanted to respond to the text in a more active way, as a maker rather than a reader.” At the show’s centre was a stage in the shape of the novel’s giant black cat Behemoth, which hosted a wild, tribal trance of a performance by the artist Ieva Miseviciuté at the opening night. Around this, the paintings captured key moments from the novel in the artist’s signature style.
Like the painter Ella Kruglyanskaya, his friend and fellow Russian émigré in New York, in the past few years, Kantarovsky has garnered serious attention for his visually delicious blend of striking, flat, bold colours, art-historical references and figures reminiscent of bygone illustration, as well as his disquieting, melancholy eroticism. Previous works include depictions of bodies piled high beneath a booted dominatrix, or guys caught with their trousers down. “I always look for contradictory moments that aren’t easily nameable,” he says. “The discomfort that results when looking at something that is both funny and frightening, for instance, can be really meaningful.”
In his treatment of Bulgakov’s book’s most memorable moment, the heroine Margarita’s naked broomstick flight to Satan’s ball, her body is depicted as a smooth outline of echoing curves, while the novel’s villains, Moscow’s literary union members, stare at her like frustrated Peeping Toms from an apartment block reduced to floating abstract squares. “She appears mischievous, witchy and unhinged, while the frightened bureaucrats are confined to their broken windows, antagonised and stuck in the real world,” he says.
As hostess of the ball, Margarita is shown from behind, with a voluptuous giant peach of a bum, in a set-up reminiscent of Manet’s sassy nude hanging with fully dressed dandies, Luncheon on the Grass. Kantarovsky, though, is keen to acknowledge another talent lesser-known in the West: “Nadya Rusheva was a wunderkind who illustrated the novel in the 1960s, and died tragically at the age of 16, leaving behind thousands of brilliant drawings. When my plan to curate a show of her drawings fell through, I decided to incorporate some into the paintings. So, oddly enough, I can’t take full credit for the curvy bum.”
Text by Skye Sherwin, taken from Issue 42 of 10 Men
Image: Apricot Juice (2015), Studio Voltaire, London
