Sanya Kantarovsky | 'Basic Failure' | Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti | 6 May – 22 November

A boy, whose grey-blue, unblemished complexion suggests an age too young to be smoking, clasps a thin cigarette between his elongated, Egon Schiele-esque fingers. His dark, navy eyes are unfocused and his mouth sallow, bearing a sadness beyond his years. The painting has a touch of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period and a whisper of Marlene Dumas and Anne Rothenstein, but rendered in a denser, meandering oil unique to the Russian-born, New York-based artist Sanya Kantarovsky. This solitary image, along with a fallen-at-the-first-hurdle title, ‘Basic Failure’, is all we have to go on regarding the artist’s Venice solo show, but it’s tantalizing in its melancholy and promises to be strange – a breach in the biennale frivolity for some real introspection. 

– SEAN BURNS, associate editor