‘It’s like a Ouija board – I listen to the painting’: the supernatural art of Sanya Kantarovsky

The Russian-born artist’s work can hypnotise, deceive or even transform into a mushroom. He talks about his Venice show full of Christian iconography and haunting depictions of children Sanya Kantarovsky’s paintings are filled with the dishevelled and the fallible: figures that bite and pin each other into submission, draw blood, appear hypnotised or sometimes transmogrify into a mushroom. The otherworldly intensity that has defined the 44-year-old’s work to date is as strong as ever in his new show, Basic Failure, which recently opened in Venice to coincide with the Biennale. Located at Venice’s Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts – a palazzo with high ceilings and a dark terrazzo-marbled floor, the walls lined with antique books – the exhibition opens with the diminutive portrait, Boy With Cigarette, in which the thickly painted, pallid, downturned young face of a boy, outlined in darkening blue brushstrokes, is seen caressing an unlit cigarette with tendril-like fingers. As Kantarovsky observes, his characters “feel both familiar and kind of alien at the same time”. This saturnine image is counterbalanced by the giddy expression of innocence nearby – a chil