Amelia Johnson Contemporary Until March 26

Konstantin Bessmertny, one of the most visible artists working in Macau, is widely and rightly respected for his willingness to engage in both sustained inquiry into singular aesthetic topics and experimental approaches to multiple styles and interests. In the two series of paintings and installations exhibited here, he works with an archaeology of layer and allusion through absurd and indistinct reference that turns the explicit arrangement of symbolic visual components into an evolving organic process; Bessmertny handles the brush with an admirable degree of aggression and aplomb, crafting wickedly luscious human forms and sumptuous architectural environments that continue transformations of quality and character as the artist proceeds.

In Rooms, a series that spans the last two years, consists of fictional dramatic incidents that take place within interior settings based on the grand spaces of the Old World, draws from both art historical references and the compositional strategies of popular culture forms – a Botero here and a Titian there, like a less obnoxious George Condo. Girl with a Pearl Earring (2010) is exemplary in this regard: clearly alluding to Vermeer, the titular subject is actually an elderly woman carrying a teapot across a luxuriously furnished and cavernous room toward a seated male figure – the earring in question visible if indistinct. Other paintings hang along the walls, sometimes specific masterpieces but more commonly a raw state of reference. In several pieces, captions sit atop the picture plane or crawl within it, seemingly breeding with architectural ornament.

Though several dioramas in mixed media fail to capture this precise balance between living flesh and stagnant space, a series of Ballardian paintings of black and white cars derived from filmic imagery – juxtaposed appropriately with subtitles and neon – present an alternative to these situations, offering the violence of a “Crash” in place of the social slow burn.

Robin Peckham