When Konstantin Bessmertny was a child, growing up in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he was greeted by an image of Mao Zedong every morning. That was an accident of geography. He lived in Blagovesthensk, which is on the Sino-Russian border, and in order to make a political point the Chinese people in the town on the other side of the river made their portrait of Mao so massive that none of their neighbours could fail to notice.
Now Bessmertny, 33, is a painter. Some of his canvases are enormous but the details . . . well, the details can be described only as microscopic. Maybe that's what happens when you've spent your formative years looking at one huge bland face: you like to fill your work with hundreds of tiny people spewing and gambling and behaving lecherously and fumbling along with the colourful business of life. Bessmertny has been compared to Bruegel and Bosch, but his paintings are more naughty than the former and less nightmarish than the latter. And neither of those two artistic gentlemen could call upon the vagaries of life in Macau to fill their works.
Bessmertny lives on Taipa island. He has a studio in one apartment block and his home in an adjacent one. While it's not exactly the equivalent of a dacha deep in the Russian countryside, it's a satisfactory arrangement.
Indeed, the artist - large, warm, twinkling-eyed, conforming in every respect to the stereotype of the hospitable, artistic Russian - is worried that the bright spaciousness of his living arrangements might signal unbecoming wealth. He is at pains to point out that Macau is a great deal cheaper than Hong Kong. He has not sold out, despite his flight from a socialist system in decay.
'Perestroika was . . . complicated,' says Bessmertny thoughtfully. 'The system was in the destruction stage. It was difficult to find canvas, paints. Russia had to find resources within Russia.' In 1992, he was living in Vladivostok with his wife, Galina, who teaches music, and his son Maxim, now nine. He had an invitation to exhibit in Macau, so he came alone via Harbin and Guangzhou ('Terribly scary, so polluted, like the end of the world . . . I feel I have nothing to breathe') and found it beautiful. His work was admired and the gallery offered a year's contract. Six months later the family was reunited and, in the face of complicated bureaucratic arrangements within which Bessmertny is endlessly enmeshed, they have been there ever since. Four months ago, Sasha was born, an event which prompted her father to take on his little studio.
'We went through some troubles, life is not so easy, no? But I like to stay here. Half the time I spend in my studio, half the time I spend in solving all my documents. The revolution has made a wall, people looking at each other like enemies, and I still feel this. But that's okay. I've lost everything in Russia, it was all confiscated, and really we don't have a place to go.' In any case, the things he misses - the intellectual discussions, the artists' parties, the debates in cosy studios - have disappeared in the rush to capitalism. 'I miss the past,' he remarks sadly. 'I once went back, in 1994, and I was shocked, it was absolutely a foreign country. Before we talked about art and poetry. Now it is all money.' And so he creates a new life in Macau. And naturally, he creates new work. 'In Russia I did more monumental things. But here, I face a lot of questions about communalism - how different people can live together - and urbanism. You know, in Siberia you can have a square kilometre with not one person in it. Here the feeling is of the over-occupied space.' His canvases therefore are crammed with figures, tiny strange beings - some in stockings and garters, some in dinner jackets, some quaint, some revolting, some Asian, some Western - all busily pursuing their cluttered, sullied lives. He paints narratives, clusters of vignettes stretching from the underworld right up to the heavens (not much sign of holiness up there though). And, since he's been heavily inspired by the gamblers' haven of Macau, naturally there are plenty of gambling motifs. In his show at Galerie Martini which opens tomorrow for a month, he has devoted a whole series of paintings to those who gamble, and there are other darkly cheerful works devoted to a variety of vices including 'careerism'.
