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.