SPLICE
Victor Berezovsky
Mary Newton Gallery

4 – 22 April, 2006

This series considers aspects of mortality, vulnerability, growth and renewal.

The initial impulses for the work were guided by certain key words, ideas, images and feelings. Some of these have been explored previously in my work. In this series they have been reduced into singular forms. Some of these things included:

A shape or a form that has a central core, and from which a dualism occurs or grows out of.

Multiplicity, often based around dualisms. For example, between the ground and the space above it; the outside versus the inside; a figure in a vertical position and a figure in a horizontal position.

Images of hands, holding onto and separating plants. The holding and letting go of something.

The unity of threes: three forms or parts of a whole. Two figures or forms contemplating a third. At the time I thought of mourners or supporters. These figures act as an embrace, a guide or channel for the third.

These starting points were slowly consolidated by my working process. Rather than being didactic, the forms you see are organic in substance and meaning. They grow in different directions, contract and expand. They have a point of origin but there is no fixed boundary to constrain scale and space outside of the image. This permits the forms and ideas to grow allowing the viewers mind to inhabit the shapes without closing down meaning.

In part, I associate my working process with my interest in meditation. When meditating, thoughts enter your mind and rather than trying to focus or discount them, you soften your mind to allow them to pass through you. In the same way, I tried to allow the images to hold aspects of the ideas and feelings I was grasping towards but avoided solidifying them into a specific reading. At the same time the "completed" form had to have the right overall integration between form and content. I arrived at a harmonious conclusion when the parts were transcended to a greater whole and this greater whole shed light on the parts.

The forms have a certain fragility. In Vigil, the ‘head form’, which is made up of two inward bending forms, is precariously balanced on a point. My grandmother was in a hospital ward having had a stroke. What struck me were the faces of the people in this ward. Their eyes some how reduced inward, lost in the past and trapped in the present. Fragility is something we all share but in this environment it was held at the surface.

While trying to include this fragility, the forms are also deliberate and strong in their construction. Fragility is countered in the singular nature of the form’s construction. Each form is of one shape. This treatment is a counter point to their fragility. In this sense I see the work as celebratory, positive and constructive.

The following quote by Italio Calvino refers to the essential qualities of writing. I feel that it equally applies to picture making, and sums up the qualities I was searching for in this series of work:

I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come to us through every period of history ,ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is despised or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86’, Harvard University Press, p 77.