Pay pal

Sanya Kantarovsky’s strange and often comical paintings bring together diverse painterly techniques and styles. 'Pay pal' features a dog shaking a person’s hand that the artist has depicted in a style reminiscent of a children’s book illustration. The simple, graphic form of this figurative element contrasts with the painting’s abstract ground which Kantarovsky created with watercolour and pigment dispersion, giving it a fluid quality and creating a surreal, ambiguous space. After sustained viewing, one may notice that these two seemingly disparate aspects of the painting appear to interact with the outline of the dog sometimes conforming to the chance shapes in the underlying watercolour.