Macau, located in Southern China, was a Portuguese Colony until 1999 and remains today a fusion of east and west - along with being a gambler's paradise. Chinese flavours are evident in Konstantin Bessmertny's work, through his stringent observations of this Vegas of the east. But Bessmertny's work incorporates far more than this and his strictly formal education is glaringly transparent. Many of his works pay homage to masters such as Hieronymous Bosch, Velasquez and Leonardo da Vinci. Just like them, composition is of paramount importance to Bessmertny who will frequently spend up to a year making adjustments to the positioning of his melange of quirky characters. Just a glance at Concerto for Piano & Orchestra in which he spent a year circumnavigating the problem of depicting an orchestra without portraying a single face pays testimony to this.
Furthermore, there's a strong narrative element to his work which poses questions and leaves answers freestanding. Why is this man in knight wear? Why does the nude pianist in Piano Lesson attract no attention from her suited audience but only from we the onlookers? Clues may be supplied but the answers remain abstracted or left to the viewer's imagination.
Bessmertny chooses to place his characters in what has become known as an absurd or topsy-turvy world which includes a dash of folklore, shared, perhaps, by the magical realism of his predecessors such as Russia's classic novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. Adding further to the ludicrousness of the situations depicted by the artist, are the words he chooses, either seemingly spurious phrases, individual words or the titles of the paintings in most cases painted or scraped onto the canvas. Phrases such as "It ain't my smile, it ain't my style, it ain't my beach" (by heavy metal band Metallica) and which adorn his double bass piece, Spectate!, are the products of a humorous mind using a language that is not of his native tongue. However, although Bessmertny admits to there being a comic element in his work he claims that they have not been painted to make people laugh. Rather, he uses humour to bring out the poignancy of life.
After an eight year classic education in art, Bessmertny produces most of his paintings from his mind's eye, believing also that reference to any photographic images amounts to cheating. His method of painting starts with stringent observation and a sketchy outline, although the finished products often bear little resemblance to their beginnings. His depth of observation becomes even more apparent when one considers the surfaces of his canvas. Paint is applied in jabbing brushstrokes, layers are added and scraped away and a palette knife is used to pick out certain features.
Bessmertny believes that painting is a solution-finding exercise which forces the artist to remain at once the creator and the critic. And in spite of the laborious and time consuming methods he employs, he believes that the value of art lies not so much in the end product but in the process that it has taken him to get there.
Lucinda Knight
2004 | 
