He left the USSR in 1981. He learnt his solid art in the Russian Academies. He is aware of it and it shows.

    Bitman vigorously places himself in the Grand Tradition illustrated by such painters as Petrov-Vodkine and Balthus. Far from any form of expressionism, he strives for classical continuity, in other words a slow pace through a combination of willpower and thirst for knowledge rather than speedy showmanship.

    You do net need to be an art critic to realize from the outset that we are dealing with an artist who has reached such a degree of perfection that the only problem posed by his technique is how to delve further into his thoughts.

    Bitman's drawing is essential, through his precision and selection, to gain the essence of form and construction. His painting, sometimes streaked but never pointillist, in his reclining nudes down to the grain of their skin, manages to breathe life into inert objects in his still lives and succeeds in his landscapes in simultaneously expressing apparitions of what have already become memories. Lire abounds everywhere with the frailty of the ephemeral. Light unexpectedly surges out from chiaroscuro blending a woman's body into the painting's background which has produced or absorbed it. The whole history of painting is here, with this artist who is producing today while reflecting from one subject to another and one artist to another through a series of scrupulously assimilated references from Piero Della Francesca to Vermeer and from Zurbaran to Chardin.

    Bitman told me that he did a large amount of research into the mimicry of poses over the centuries. Serve poses painted by Balthus are seen again in Poussin who in turn was inspired by a Renaissance painter. Bitman gathers together this precious heritage, this echo whose last syllables have reached him. He prefers poses that last and endure, that are timeless, such as this reclining woman, the essence of the universal theme, but which adopts a different form in each generation as the artist is influenced by the mark of time. This means recreating rather than redoing, using the sensitivity of our time to compensate for what has disappeared.

    Our epoch undeniably magnifies the present. This seems to be equally the case with Bitman whose ordinary women are saints often crowned with halos radiating vibrant or dull light. The whole body and the objects themselves become mandorias, ghosts or luminous miracles in the middle of the universe, making up for the absence of gods by the simple fact of being there, interrupted but eternal.

    The mysticism that comes out of Bitman's work is net ideological but is the person's mysticism. The person exists because he is painted, otherwise we would not see that he exists, and he would always be obscured by the indifference of contours.

    This explains Bitman's grainy approach to life's perspectives. He does not share Seurat's scientific optimism, and agglomerates rather than separates, energetically trying to obtain the whole emanating from each person, object and construction. The magnification of objects in his still lives is evidence of this but also participates in search for the end in the endless. The result when contemplating Bitman's paintings is tension induced by what he can express and the emergence of a life parallel to his own, as if he had suddenly become an actor in a Woody Allen film and he crossed through the screen separating him from his timeless truth.

    The fullness of Bitman's paintings fills the void felt by everyone. They fill the striving for eternity. The person in the middle of life fleeing it only expresses the striving to be and to remain. Aestheticism, harmony and beauty are vital needs, supernatural prevention against the lack of hope. When Bitman's woman stops being desired to extend out without being touched, when Bitman's still lives impose their reified mutism by losing normal value, we clearly sense through our inability to stop looking at the painting, that a metamorphosis is produced both in the painting and in us, transforming each minute's contemplation into an endless moment.