In a splendid Venetian palazzo, artist Sanya Kantarovsky captures a poetic cast of enigmatic figures

'I work very intuitively,' says Sanya Kantarovsky on the eve of the opening of his exhibition ‘Basic Failure' at Palazzo Loredan in Venice – one of Wallpaper’s must-sees during the Venice Art Biennale 2026. ‘I rarely start with a preconceived notion or an idea. I have some vague sense of an effect, or even maybe a theme, which is usually a reaction to the circumstances of the exhibition.'

Kantarovsky, who was born in Moscow before emigrating to New York when he was ten, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. His instincts take shape in haunting works – mostly painting, but also drawing, sculpture, printmaking and animation. Drawn to the complexities and contrasts that make up the spectrum of human emotion, the only thing certain in Kantarovsky's eclectic subject matter, which criss-crosses religion, history, philosophy and spirituality, is an appeal to the raw intuitiveness of human nature.

It's natural to want to read into Kantarovsky's richly emotional figures, but he eschews traditional storytelling as we normally understand it. ‘I have a complicated relationship to narrative,' he says. ‘Of course, the paintings are representational, often figurative, and there is an implied narrative. I liken it to when you're walking down the street and you catch someone's eye, and you witness them for a second. You're aware that there was a moment before you witnessed them and a moment after, but you just have this fleeting second to see this fragment of their struggle or their existence.' These glimpses resist a linear narrative (‘For me, it's the way to make an interesting painting,' he adds), but they are sensitive and highly attuned to their surroundings.

The grand Palazzo Loredan is an appropriately atmospheric location for this new exhibition, running concurrently to the Venice Art Biennale, until November 2026. It unites a series of Kantarovsky's paintings, as well as ceramic work and a glass sculpture created in collaboration with a Murano studio.

‘It's an ancient, historical and extravagant space, and it's filled with ancient books. Those things have their own energy. This show questions what that means, and tries to engage in a generative conversation with the space. I try not to get attached to anything within each painting, and then I try not to get attached to any particular painting, and keep the exhibition itself as the priority. Once the paintings start happening, and they all start talking to one another, and I start talking to them, it becomes like you're writing out a kind of poem composed of fragments or stanzas.'

In the works, the figures are caught in heightened states, contorted or cringing, intimately revealing and yet elusive. ‘The narrative and subject matter are very slippery, and so things could be read in a number of different ways. It is very important to keep that dimension of the painting open. There are innocuous and banal ways to interpret something, and then there are very dark ways to interpret something. And sometimes it's even unclear whether a subject is in distress or ecstasy, and what exactly is at stake.'

It is also unclear where or when these very real moments are taking place. The scenes are slippery in both narrative and time – often, scenes could be medieval, mythical or biblical, but modern detailing stops us short. ‘I'm pulling from just existing in the world,' Kantarovsky says. ‘I'm pulling from my lived experience and those of my friends, from art history. Everything's game. Everything is up for grabs. And I think that's a really exciting part of it.'

Featured in the show is a dying centaur, a favourite motif of artists in ancient Greece, but also popular in the 19th century as a symbol of the end of ancient, spiritual regimes. ‘It is also this kind of basic failure – the name of the show – of integration between our animal selves and our socialised selves,' says Kantarovsky. Caught, helpless, we are reduced to the essential. Witnessing this in the works makes them deeply empathetic.

This vulnerability runs throughout in powerful symbols, which are separated from their source of power, whether it is in a dying classical era or in a painting of a submissive without his dominant. ‘You go grandiose into this poetic narrative, and then you fall down into this mundane, indescript bedroom with the overweight older man and his little white dog, and the viewer has to make those shifts. I'm interested in these sorts of juxtapositions. I think with paintings, it's really interesting, because you can shift a viewer from one place to another.'

The works aren't about him, Kantarovsky says. ‘I can't avoid them representing something specific about myself, because they come from my mind. But at the same time, I'm utterly uninterested in my uniqueness or my specificity. What I think is so interesting is when good art can splinter off the subjective and find its way into somebody else's identification. It's part of the reason I'm interested in figurative painting, because there is this empathy or over-identification that it tends to produce in the viewer. You start to feel that certain pictures touch you in a way, and it's extremely powerful, despite seeming somewhat anachronistic.'

‘Basic Failure' runs 6 May – 22 November 2026 at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, istitutoveneto.it

This article appears in the June 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 7 May in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today