The press communication for Sanya Kantarovsky’s show “Basic Failure” led with his painting Boy with Cigarette (2026), in which a hollow-eyed boy stares blankly into the distance, portrayed in heavy strokes of oily blues and whites. The piece is very small and

it has a frosting-like texture; the boy’s long, tensile fingers are seemingly extruded from the viscous paint. The work looks like it was made at the turn of the twentieth century instead of at the onset of the twenty-first. It conjures the feeling that Kantarovsky,

long since dead, had left this collection behind to some trust for perpetuity’s sake. That the setting for the show is Palazzo Loredan in Venice, a sixteenth century Gothic edifice and home to the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, only emphasizes the temporal peculiarity of his work.