Faithful Companions
We don’t live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversations. Because you need to add
something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it.1
In the aftermath of an unexpected moment, we experience the world in heightened ways. We look
at familiar things noticing their texture for the first time; we hear, smell and feel in new and intense
ways. Our perspective shifts to cut through all the white noise, and some vital aspect of being hu-
man and living on this planet comes into view.
When Victor Berezovsky read Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich he experienced this phe-
nomenon—albeit secondhand. In this book Alexievich records the experiences of the people of
Chernobyl remembered seven years after the town’s nuclear reactor exploded and burned for sev-
eral months. On his recommendation, I read it too. Multiple voices recount the experience of the
disaster and its aftermath. They describe what happened to them but also how that experience
transformed the way they felt about the landscape, the animals, their neighbours, the government,
the national character, the Soviet Union, their health and that split-second shift from before to after.
Reading this book also gave me the sense of a particular Russian voice and attitude, a poetic
philosophising, a sense of history that is so different from the ways of thinking about the world that
occur in the South Pacific where I live. Aotearoa is Victor’s birthplace, but both his parents were
born in Manchuria in north eastern China, part of a large community of Russians. And like many
children of immigrants, he has the experience of a hyphenated life—one informed by two different
environments, cultures and sensibilities. As an artist, this provides him with a broad range of aes-
thetics to draw from.
When Victor rang to invite me to his studio to look at a new series, Faithful Companions, he de-
scribed the effect of reading Chernobyl, the way images flooded into his head and made their way
onto the large sheets of paper. Over the years he has spent a lot of time in Europe. Most recently
he and his family lived in Dresden, and there he made a point of frequenting the city’s museums.
Where formerly his work was characterised by a restrained colour palette, in Germany, inspired by
historic and contemporary painting, a rich colour sense took over his practice.
The paintings in Faithful Companions are exuberant with colour but a shadow hovers beneath their
surface. This is quite literally created by technique. Victor coats the paper first with a vivid blue
wax, then on top of that adds black Gesso. Next he scratches imagery into the surface scraping
away the black to reveal the blue underneath. And then in a kind of automatic painting, he adds
bright coloured inks on top.
A few days after visiting Victor and looking at his new paintings, my father was killed on the road
outside his house. Grief and sadness fogged everything. I flew to Invercargill with one of my sisters
and we arrived in time to welcome his body into the house and begin the processes—emotional,
logistical and legal—of fare welling him.
Like one of Victor’s painting, the first night in his house was eerie. Our mother had died just over a
year before and with both parents ‘gone’, the house felt hesitant as if they might return at any mo-
ment. I realised I was listening for the lavender Toyota and the graunch of the garage door opening
that would signal their return. But the night remained silent and still. My sister and I looked at each
other in wonder. The TV, usually playing the Jones Channel or Good Morning or sport, was dark
and quiet. She was on release from rehab so we couldn’t drink any of his whiskey. And I didn’t eat
From ‘Monologue about the shadow of death’, Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl, p193.
