Sanya Kantarovsky’s exhibition Basic Failure at the Palazzo Loredan includes several new paintings of searing power, wit and imagination. Many of his paintings are haunted by half-skeletal figures, often very much alive, despite their flesh having fallen—or been severed—away. Kantarovsky intended this motif as a statement about our contemporary condition: “a cheap trick to describe a simultaneity of external opulence and internal poverty”.