In the last few years seldom have I the privilege to witness a figurative imagination as rich as that of Konstantin Bessmertny. Konstantin is a Russian painter living in Macao and from the very first time I came across his work, I felt deeply attracted to its narrative charm, chromatic richness and perfect, daring performance. This long awaited moment to express my views on such an important painting experience of today has arrived and I feel happy for it.
Konstantin's painting background is deeply Russian in the way he uses the chromatic matter and mainly because he has succeeded in absorbing and changing a century-long tradition of icon painting. He organizes his compositions in a narrative way resorting to overlapping scenes (truly paintings within paintings). However, instead of copying iconographic formulas and pictorial procedures which are a feature in that Eastern European tradition, Konstantin has succeeded in mingling those references with many others that he has interposed in from the magnificent Western tradition (Bosch, Brueghel, Hogarth, for instance), while others have been based on important present-day visual systems (expressionism, surrealism, pictorial gestualism, lyrical abstraction, new figurativism) and of course of his deep appreciation of opera and on the predictable Oriental contamination (from the Buddhist painting to the local colours). He has also invented a language of his own, profoundly cosmopolitan and truly post-modernist which he has managed to keep fresh by finding different expression methods of expression approaching an original view of the world and men.
Be it portraits (in groups or individuals), in his "stories of human weaknesses", in his 'wild' paintings (formally speaking as explained below), or in his "musical instruments and other painted objects" (true iconographic installations), Konstantin paints a humanity sometimes conscious of its dignity and its inner profusion, sometimes haunted by its many weaknesses, resorting to a panoply of masks to hide those weaknesses with strength given by power, money, sex...
In Konstantin's painting the narrative structure of compositions are a base for various space options either by inventing a 3-dimensional illusions through micro-scenes very often of a burlesque nature, or by reducing the pictorial space to a staging area for gesture and matter in which the human figure increases in size but nearly disappears in the gesture and chromatic delirium.
As to the first case intentional 'quotations' from Bosch and Brueghel are especially visible when different episodes of 'today's Human Comedy' are at stake and the painter describes them through a satirical and corrosive look (Adults' Play, Tower of Babel, Vessel of Anarchy, Reversing the Revolution, etc.). Figures are reduced in size to spatial architecture, which arranges the micro-scenes and pictures within pictures becomes the main character as it evokes make-believe cartoons, or in the majority of cases, a world built by labyrinthic 'impossibilities" (much like Escher) in which humanity is 'lost'.
To compensate for these pictorial scenes overflowing with figures and subtle quotations (from the history of painting and contemporary history) there are paintings in which the artist himself has dubbed - "wild things"-, works featuring a somewhat wild way of using the matter highlighting a dominant chromatic register ('green', 'pink' or 'red'). In these paintings, figures are nearly lost given the abstracting pictorial gesture that shows the pictorial work itself. As regards the differences between the two groups of paintings, the most significant contrast refers to the way the approach the same thematic, figurative and formal universes, rather than the definition of the painter's own language. In both series his language is steady and robust in affirmative terms.
The same applies to the objects painted, the majority of which are musical instruments, as this is one of the painter's most preferred themes - music as a stage for human emotions. Taking advantage of the duality between the box and the instrument, or the obverse and the reverse, Konstantin, thanks to his peculiar way of storytelling through painting, builds true iconographic installations around themes that are easily evoked by music such as Night and Day.
Violin I - front.
KONSTANTIN BESSMERTNY (°1964).
1996. Oil on wood.
Private Collection, Macao.
Violin III- back.
KONSTANTIN BESSMERTNY (°1964).
1996. Oil on wood.
Private Collection, Macao.
In: Força e Fraquezas / Strengths & Weaknesses: Konstantin Bessmertny, Macau, [Exhibition Catalogue / Salão de Exposições Comendador Ho Yin -Clube Militar (Military Club): Novembro de 1996 [November 1996]], ill. [n. n.].
Thanks to the way he has succeeded in merging cultural tradition with plastic modernism and the innovative way he has reinstated narrative in modern day painting, Konstantin Bessmertny's work is one of the most serious plastic proposals of post-modernism. Instead of being concerned merely with showing its own procedures, this work aims at restoring painting as an end in itself and objectivity, or else as an entity in itself. It also aims at being a 'communication' of 'another' vision of passing time.
Macao, October-November 1996.
Revised reprint of:
BAPTISTA PEREIRA, Fernando António, Strengths and Weaknesses: Comments on Konstantin Bessmertny's Paintings, in "Força e Fraquezas / Strengths "Weaknesses: Konstantin Bessmertny", Macau, [Exhibition Catalogue /Salão de Exposições Comendador Ho Yin - Clube Militar (Military Club): Novembro de 1996 [November 1996], p. [n. n.]
* Historian and Museologist. Director of the Museu de Setúbal (Setúbal Museum), Setúbal, Portugal. Lecturer at the Faculdade de Belas Artes (Faculty of Arts) of the Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), Lisbon. Consultant of the Projecto de Recuperação das Ruínas de S. Paulo (Museology of the Vestiges of the Old College of St. Paul) and of the Gabinete do Museu de Macau (Cabinet of the Macao Museum), both in Macao.
start p. 159
end p.