Nothing could be more apt than to see Konstantin Bessmertny's paintings in a [Chinese] New Year exhibition. With their riot of rich-coloured figures in their merry-go-round situations, Konstantin's paintings are the artistic equivalent to fireworks. Besides, during New Year the whole world goes a little mad.
This exhibition comes soon after Konstantin's one-man show in Lisbon last October [1995]. Here as there, we are presented with an impressive group of works, executed mainly in oils on canvas, sometimes acrylic, in which the artist displays an evengreater thematic and technical inventiveness, complexity and mastery. They range from the 1993 portrait of his son Maxim, to the 1994-1995 series entitled Games Ⅰ， Ⅱ and III, and the recent City and Nude with Apples.
Apart from his rather romantic nudes, pictures of beautiful women, portraits of friends and the like, many of the works convey the artist's preoccupation with what in contemporary literature has been labeled "the Absurd".
Konstantin's playfully ironical creations reveal several important artistic influences, although one of these seems to stand out in the narrative paintings. His figures, structures and settings often recall the work of Peter Brueghel the Elder. Like Brueghel's they are also creatures of fantasy. But in Konstantin's narrative paintings the world of Brueghel is brought crashing with meteoric frenzy right into the dying twentieth century. As it moved forward in time, it passed through the worlds of Chagall, Picasso, and the Russian tradition and abstract expressionism.
The works speak of modern-day frivolities but do not celebrate them. Rather, they present us with a picture of our fin-de-siècle. In them people dance, play, go through social rituals, make sex. All the clocks tick, surrealistically announcing the end of the millennium. And Jesus Christ, in Konstantin's series of spiritual paintings, returns riding on a donkey.
Macao, December 1995
Revised reprint of:
GUILLÉN-NUÑEZ, César, O mundo desorientado de Konstantin Bessmertny, in "Pintura de Konstantin Bessmertnyi", Macau, [Exhibition Catalogue / Galeria de Exposições Temporárias do Leal Senado: 5 a 18 de Janeiro 1996 [5th-28th January 1996]], pp. [17-19] —Portuguese version.
Balalaika (Hommage to the International Revolution) — front.
KONSTANTIN BESSMERTNY (ō 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.].
* Historian of Western art, writer and researcher on colonial Portuguese and Spanish art. He has an M. Phil. from University College London, University of London (1997), an M. A. from Pennsylvania University, as well as a B. A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art (1973), London.
Professionally he is mainly a curator of art exhibitions and writer on colonial and modern art, but he has also been a lecturer in the History of Western Art in local universities. More recently he is a Guest Curator of the Government of Macao. In the past he has curated exhibitions for the Orient Foundation, Lisbon, at the Centro Cultural de Belém, as well as for the Servicos Recreativos e Culturais (Cultural and Recreational Services) of the Leal Senado of Macao and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. These have included both China Trade artists and contemporary artists. Konstantin Bessmertny's paintings caught his attention from the very first showing of this artist's work in Macao.
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