Sanya Kantarovsky’s exhibition at Palazzo Loredan extends the artist’s interdisciplinary practice with site-specific interventions engaging with the architecture of this historical site.
The exhibition will encompass a group of paintings, ceramic works, and a sculpture made in collaboration with a Murano glass studio. This new body of work deepens an ongoing throughline of Kantarovsky’s inquiry into humanist, art historical themes of spirituality, alienation, and vulnerability within the tradition of the painted figure.
It could be that something has already gone wrong here. Not in a way that can be pointed to now and repaired, but stemming from much earlier on. No, not broken. Worse, maybe — never fully formed.
Taboo, Freud reminds us, names something difficult to translate: at once sacred and dangerous, consecrated and unclean, “not based upon any divine ordinance… Taboo prohibitions have no grounds and are of unknown origins.” Taboo expresses that which is unapproachable. Preceding religion, taboo carries a strange power to infect. “Our collocation ‘holy dread’ would often coincide in meaning with ‘taboo.’” To touch the wrong thing, to come too close to the dead, even to mourn them too intensely — these become charged, requiring rituals, purifications, punishments.
And then, at some point, everything splits. Gods and demons, men and animals, the living and the dead, nature and culture, veneration and horror. The split does not resolve anything. Pushed into privacy or invisibility, it only multiplies rituals. The Eucharist dissolves on a tongue. Sundays funnel away. Our world fragments and isolates. The Individual is born! A mischievous child, whip in hand, testing something close to cruelty without knowing what it is. Not yet guilty, but already busy redeeming himself. Soon numb. Felix culpa, the auspicious prospect of divine absolution, has the shape of an explanation, a consolation inside alienation. The nucleus of neurosis, Freud writes, “is against touching” — délire du toucher — demonstrating the persistence of taboo in even the dumbest compulsion: to wash our hands.
Let’s try another figure: the centaur. Half one thing, half another, held together at a seam that is always visible. The join is exposed — a fault line. The centaur, in myth and meaning (and probably in a dead language), speaks of a coherence it cannot quite support: about a man who was once close to his animal instincts and the world. It is said that when he first painted the ox, he was the killer of the ox, the consumer of the ox, the memory of the ox. Meaning, he was the ox. Our centaur doesn’t die so much as leave a man on the ground by joining his legs with the skies above. “A man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss,” the poet Paul Celan reminds us. We are making room for a gap. “What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine,” Freud quotes Goethe at the end of Totem and Taboo, hoping that we might find some kind of continuity with this ancient picture of life. Oh, the hopes of a psychoanalyst.
Now, there is no outside with which to commune. We surf a digital sea and are delivered from one surface to another. We are lucky if we can push our nose against paint, feel its weight. Sublimate. Know the painter touching, and touching, and then restricting his touch, completed in whatever time they live. Feel them circling an impossible union of the sacred and the profane, making the painting itself a final, taboo object. The artist enters a trance, invents a ritual, sifts our memories, lives a private economy of expenditure and punishment. Oh, for shame to witness these pathetic stains on a surface! Basic Failure means this: first there is recognition — it’s me, a star in this dark pool — and a second later, back to nothing again. We may, only for a moment, “serve as… life’s happy fault, in which man, distinguishing himself from his essence, discovers his existence.” The pull of desire, tainted by forbidden filth. A flash of an ancient feeling. Freud’s holy dread.
–Jamieson Webster
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