Igor Bitman, born in Moscow 1953 and living in Paris, is in fact a painter and photographer. With this exhibition he reveals both his artistic identities, usually kept separate. Yet they interpenetrate.
His shots, extremely pictorial, reveal a particular attention to light, rhythm, atmosphere, elements equally essential in his pictorial images.
The large painting “Les Européens” was conceived by Bitman in 2005 but completed only last year, perhaps driven by the latest dramatic events that are shaking Europe.
Small, in the background, the flag of Ukraine. There are numerous characters that populate this large canvas of over two meters, which we have chosen to display in the window, and around which the entire exhibition revolves. "The Rape of Europe", taken from Greek mythology, is at the center of the painting: Jupiter, transformed into a bull, conquers and kidnaps Princess Europa.
The citations and references to the great masters of the past are evident in this work, from Tiziano to El Greco, from Velasquez to Giorgione. You can recognize the faces taken from masterpieces such
as Botticelli's Venere, Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto as well as a portrait by Ingres and, of course, the self-portrait of Igor Bitman who is confused among the crowd.

The works on display deserve to be seen in person, as the particularly fascinating pictorial matter is an integral part of Bitman's work.
In addition to oil painting and oil pastels, the author also uses the ancient encaustic technique, which involves the use of pure pigments, dissolved in wax, and applied to the canvas with special tools to obtain a pictorial material dense and consistent. A technique that the author experimented with Anso (Anne-Sophie Cavalier), pupil, muse, model, with which Bitman gave life to a group of very fascinating works, executed with two hands, which bear the double signature, some of which are now on display as part of this exhibition. With these words Enrico Giustacchini presented their works on the occasion of the 2003 exhibition at Galleria Forni: Bitman's way of painting "... longs for an absolute classicism, of those impervious to any transience, to any aging. (…) this pair of artists is imbued with the light of a silent and dazzling
universe. And it models algebraic and velvety architecture, redesigns landscapes with golden proportions and impeccable perspectives. It descends into such panoramas as if depositing them after a light flight, after a soft and silent telekinesis from remote cosmos of the soul - rarefied figures and things, ethereal yet alive, passed through blood and lymph, children of a different, solemn and languid chemistry: the same chemistry as ecstasy and dream.”

“...a solemn world, ancient because it is rich in history, and therefore apparently eternal and immutable in its identity (...). Thus Bitman's research, although speaking of dreamism would be misleading, gives voice, in the silence of his images, to ancient and archetypal stories. Eternal. Faces, buildings, monuments, "things" that impose themselves with rarefied violence on the scene. (Alberto Sebastiani)

Bitman recently exhibited in China, where he lived for some time working on a series of portraits of great evocative power, some of which are part of the exhibition's corpus.
The camera has always been his working tool, a sort of "notebook", but now it has become his second profession. The most recurring photographic theme is female beauty, nudes and portraits.