Autumn 2024
Interview with Bezverkhni of Ghent / Mikhail Bezverkhni (b. 1947)
Hilde Van Canneyt (HVC): Dear Bezverkhni, when did you start painting?
BvG When I was 29, for fourteen years I followed a broad art training with four pillars: music, painting, poetry and philosophy. I received it from the great maestro Vladimir Raykov, a pupil of Rafaël Falk, a renowned Soviet artist. I was his pupil until the 1990s and visited him several times a week. He taught me not only the technical fundamentals, but above all the essence of what art truly is. Many people possess technique, but that does not yet make them an artist. It is crucial to understand why art exists and what role it plays in life.
In the 1990s I moved to Belgium — at first my second country, today my motherland. For fifteen years I kept my paintings to myself; hardly anyone knew I was working on them. Outwardly I was mainly a musician and composer. After sixteen years something paradoxical happened. In 2007 I organised a concert at De Rode Pomp in Ghent and attached a tombola to it. The first prize was a work of mine. I claimed I had never painted before. (laughs) For the first time in a long while I created a painting again, and immediately everything broke loose: emotion, desire and hunger. Suddenly I was painting five works a day again. Unexpectedly, exhibitions abroad followed. In Boulogne I played a concert where even the bishop was present! At that moment I was both a musician and a visual artist.
HVC: Should I imagine that playing the violin demands full concentration, while painting gives you more a sense of freedom?
BvG Not necessarily. In music I am just as boundless as in my painting. I also play tennis: when I play a match, it is all the way. The only difference between winning and losing is: smoking or not smoking. (laughs) But painting seems to me closer to composing. Music will always remain a constant in my life. Poetry I have left behind me.
HVC: Do you get ideas for portraits by leafing through books in your studio?
BvG It arises from the emotion of the moment. A newspaper in Boulogne once wrote: ‘A new direction has emerged, the momentalism of Mikhail Bezverkhni.’
When I am working on a painting, I cannot eat or sleep until it is finished. Continuously doing the same thing is not in my nature. My master advised me to use everything at hand: both thematically and in material. I painted with coffee, mustard, ketchup — in short, unconventional means. Also with sand, that is a classic. I even mix acrylic with oil paint, technically unorthodox, but for me a good ‘salad’.
HVC: As soon as you feel like painting, you just begin?
BvG I always feel like painting — day and night! I just sometimes lack the time. I am now working on a commission for Berlin: four seasons, twelve months. But ultimately I follow my intuition and do what I long for at that moment.
HVC: Is your studio at your home?
BvG I have a caravan that is fully fitted out as a studio. There I find everything I need.
HVC: In the exhibition Bij de meesters (Nodenaysteen, Ghent 2025) we see varied portraits: self-portraits, historical figures… Sometimes you need twenty minutes, sometimes as much as five hours to complete a work. Do you consider yourself an expressionist?
BvG No. An expressionist often works for months on a single work; I want to finish a painting in one movement.
HVC: What drives you to make art? You don't have to do it ‘for the women’: you are a master in music and won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1976.
BvG Why do I live? I am 77. Many loved ones have died, even those who never smoked or drank. As a violinist I often played at funerals. So I regularly asked myself: ‘Why am I still here?’ Because I still have something to do in art. But then the second question follows: ‘What is art?’ Art is concentrated life. And actually everything is art, if only you really look.
An artist — painter, composer, photographer or poet — concentrates moments and shows them, sharpened, to others. As Goya did too. Not decoratively beautiful, but existential. Music is the gospel to me. I am not talking about meditative Eastern music; that is “atmosphere”. Our art illustrates our life and our history. I, Mikhail Bezverkhni, want to leave behind as much as possible when I depart upwards.
HVC: You have meanwhile built up an extensive oeuvre. At the Nodenaysteen a portrait gallery of yours is on view.
BvG Life is a story; art is that story in concentrated form.
HVC: Would you have missed something if you had only played the violin?
BvG Certainly. The strongest instinct is the sexual instinct, and it causes many catastrophes. I too was a slave to it. I wanted a family, but needed more. That instinct is physiological and stands apart from art. People sometimes say I am married to my violin.
HVC: You call painting romantic. Is it not a form of sublimation?
BvG I don't think in such academic terms. I paint stories that occur. I once saw a yellow rubbish bag on the street, tied shut with a string. I felt related to it and thought: ‘I will be murdered tomorrow.’ That is why I painted a face on that rubbish bag: simple fantasy!
HVC: You see your works as dream images; you don't want to hold up a mirror to people.
BvG An ordinary person sees colour. A poet sees, behind a wall, a castle with princesses. That is the difference. If you look at the stones on the Sint-Baafsplein, you can discover — at least in your imagination — countless portraits in the cracks. An artist need not fantasise; he must see what others do not see and make visible what remains hidden to others.
HVC: What do you think of your colleague Gipi – Pierre Gillis – who is showing his well-known drawings here with you?
BvG Why is he a grandmaster? With pure black and white he creates effects of colour. He constructs his drawings almost like bas-reliefs, whereas a drawing is normally flat. His level is no less than that of Leonardo da Vinci. Why does he work with photographic figures? He is a realist, like the artists of the 19th century, when photography did not yet exist. After the invention of photography, painters no longer had to be photographic, and the progression — as well as regression — towards abstraction began. Think of Pollock! But Gipi's work is at the same time contemporary.
HVC: What does contemporary art mean to you?
BvG Whoever has no story is not an artist.
In Mexico a few years ago there was an art event where people watched for hours as a dog died. No one intervened. Protest followed, and rightly so! In Copenhagen a giraffe with ‘wrong genes’ was killed and fed live to lions. That too was called ‘art’. Is that contemporary art?
HVC: Indeed something to ponder… What is the greatest compliment one can give you?
BvG That one is ‘gripped’. I was shaped by people like Elvis Presley and Édith Piaf, artists who grab the audience by the throat. My only principle is: when I make art, I must be moved myself. A musician on stage must feel a hundred times more than anyone in the hall.
HVC: There must be friction. You are not a provocateur.
BvG Life provokes enough. People sometimes ask: ‘Do you find this good?’ Time is the strongest element there is. Stronger than fire, stronger than water. Time decides what remains. Some keep art in vaults to protect it, but ultimately something greater determines what survives — as with Modigliani. When I die, I will see what place there is for my works.
HVC: When is the art of others good?
BvG Art is a concentrated story of lines. That is why I distrust art that merely wants to be ‘beautiful’. Art may be sharp and rock-'n'-roll, a mirror with many dioptres. I am extremely sensitive: films stay with me for months. Recently I saw Milano (2024), a Belgian film about a fourteen-year-old boy. Or The Deer Hunter (1978) with Robert De Niro, which got incredibly under my skin. For me, such films need not be inferior to Shakespeare.
HVC: Would you have worked differently if you had stayed in Russia?
BvG There is more freedom there than people here think. Only those who actively challenge the regime are punished; the rest are not.
HVC: Are you religious?
BvG Religion had to live in the shadows. The communist regime did not tolerate it and called religion ‘opium for the people’.
HVC: Then surely you had to consent to those in power?
BvG In Ghent too, no? Think of the low-emission zone, the circulation plan, the closure of the Sint-Annakerk… Here measures often wear a democratic mask. Belgians are indifferent. I resist that indifference.
HVC: Lovely! Stay yourself, Bezverkhni!
@hildevancanneyt
with Gipi