Holding the Line - The Art of Victor Berezovsky  
It’s a silly thing to do, really it is. Why spend hours, day after day, year after year, alone in a small  
room filled with doubt and confusion, hoping that something reveals itself through a gooey coloured  
substance?  
This might sound vaguely monastic, noble even. But it’s not. It’s a grind, just like any other.  
Strap on the harness, check the torch batteries, peer over the edge, then descend into the darkness.  
Repeat.  
There is no way to justify this ritual in ‘normal’ terms. By any measure of the mundanities of life, it  
comes up looking frivolous and indulgent. And yet…, and yet…, it must be done. A compulsion, a  
habit, an escape?  
Perhaps.  
It’s done because it has been done and will continue to be done. Justification is its own continuation,  
moving inexorably towards a place where usefulness, value, and intention collapse into a strange  
logic of unknowing.  
This is a place where uncertainty becomes geology. A landscape formed through the slow accretion  
of intuitions, where doubts settle in sedimentary layers and provisional actions form slow moving  
rivers. Old certainties erode and disperse as silt, carried downstream they gather again in rich deltas  
of ambivalence.  
To be a painter, at least in the way Victor inhabits it, is to return each day to this landscape, following  
traces of previous passages, recognising contours and recurring formations, always noticing what is  
emerging and what has shifted.  
Each painting is a map, but like Korzybski said, ‘the map is not the territory’1.  
Victor and I met at Ilam in the early 90’s. We studied painting together amongst the mess of a  
modernist party we’d turned up too late for. Concepts like surface tension and figure-ground relation  
felt like the hangover we hadn’t earned but couldn’t shake. This was before the idea of a ‘practice’  
had yet hardened into something you could name without wincing.  
Whilst most of us reveled in the extracurricular activities that went with being at art school, Victor  
did the opposite. Right from the get-go, painting for him was a refuge, a practical methodology  
where the chaos of life could be contained and stabilised between four boundaries. The why of this  
1 Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (1879–1950) was a Polish American philosopher, engineer, and scientist best known as the founder of  
general semantics. His ideas about how language and human evaluation shape perception profoundly influenced modern linguistics,  
psychology, and communication theory. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General  
Semantics (Lancaster, PA: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1933), 58.  
 
is his story to tell, and like the woodgrain of a table, it is both foundational and irrelevant. The table,  
however, is a useful metaphor because for Victor, painting is a type of table: a platform, stage or  
maybe a tableau. A place of gathering, where familiar relationships can be formed and tested.  
There are few artists I know who are as prolific, as restless, and as stubbornly focused as he is. Over  
the years I have witnessed transitions through so many phases. Different formats, scales and  
surfaces: blinds, plates, crates, paintings on the floor, paintings on the wall, things that feel humble  
and things that reach for grandeur. I have also lived with the work. I am both a friend and a collector.  
There is a particular black ink drawing in my house, made in the early 2000s, that is known in my  
family as the Pussy Rabbit. I won’t elaborate, suffice to say that Victor once told me it began as two  
pigeons kissing, then went somewhere else.  
This, in many ways, is the deep consistency of Victor’s practice. The form shifts, the surface changes,  
the relationship to figuration moves in and out of focus, but the central tension remains. There is  
always a negotiation between control and surrender. A surrender to his materials, then an attempt to  
anchor the image.  
I have often felt that Victor’s work is akin to folk art: a private language of recurring forms, slowly  
understood through use. It has little to do with collective or decorative heritage. No shared social  
vocabulary of birds, beasts and inherited signs. Its strangeness is more intimate than that. Folk art, at  
its deepest, is a way of keeping forms alive because they still have work to do. A motif returns  
because it carries something that has not been exhausted. Perhaps grief, possibly a warning. It is  
familiar enough to be welcomed and inhabited, but elastic enough to hold the circumstances of the  
present.  
Across Victor’s work, certain forms recur, chair and plate, mother and child, pillar and tether. There is  
often a sense of exchange or transmission present: a reaching across and between, through the  
painted surface and the warped space of memory. One doesn’t decode the forms. They are familiar  
tools or ritual objects that are carried from one painting to the next, one table to the next. Altered by  
handling, made strange again through repetition.  
Like a cinematic montage, what is in the frame shifts in and out of visibility, sometimes appearing as  
figures, sometimes collapsing into marks and scars. Scenes reconfigure and loop. Victor has built a  
folk language inside painting. A language of forms, arrangements and tonal gestures that are alive to  
the intimate human business of communication and frailty. Something has happened, or is about to  
happen, or has been withheld. A figure waits. Something passes. Something is mourned.  
Victor’s paintings are not comfortable. They do have play in them, but also friction. This is born of a  
willingness to sidestep the easy seduction the medium affords and let it become fraught and testy.  
Heaven forbid a painting ‘dies on the brush’, a pejorative phrase he uses to describe an expression of  
ideas versus something discovered through being made.  
This is where figuration in Victor’s work becomes slippery and interesting. It cannot be understood as  
simply a matter of recognisable bodies. He insists that the work remains figurative, even when the  
viewer cannot locate the figure. A figure can be a body, but it can also be a grouping, a spatial  
hierarchy, a charged interval between things. Structures and apertures can all carry figurative weight.  
The figure may be internally clear to him while remaining unstable or partially hidden to us. That  
instability gives the paintings much of their charge. Figuration remains present, but it is loosened  
from the need to appear as a singular entity. It becomes atmosphere, something sensed as much as  
seen.  
There are moments where Victor’s paintings could become more pleasing, more resolved or  
available. But instead, they withhold and introduce abrasion and awkwardness. Passages of paint can  
falter and lose their composure, behaving like matter under stress, something vulnerable. Paint is  
scraped, thinned and worked against itself, carrying the trauma of contact and resistance. This is  
neither carelessness nor technical limitation. It reads more as a belligerent form of truth telling, an  
insistence that the experience held in the work carries illness, instability and dread alongside  
tenderness and joy.  
There is also something important in the way the abject rubs against formal intelligence in Victor’s  
work. His paintings are highly composed. They have hierarchy, balance, and a strong internal logic.  
The lessons of modernism are evident, but the uneasy parts appear inside that structure, which is  
what makes them resonate. Distress and dissent are held within form. A painting may still have  
poise, but that poise is compromised by something rawer underneath. The work holds together, but  
only just.  
In recent years this has become more pronounced. The paintings feel closer to the edge. There is a  
sense that they might tip into illegibility, like a tentative wager has been deepened and the balance  
may not hold.  
And underlying all this is the constant pull of the studio, the grind of the adventure in that haunted,  
sacred place.  
The art world, like any other system, has its own economies of attention and value. It rewards clarity,  
signature, quick recognition. Victor’s work has never sat comfortably inside this machinery. It shifts  
too much. It refuses to become one thing. But if you stay with it, a strong continuity appears. A  
unique sensibility. A way of engaging with material and process. A way of allowing images to emerge  
and recede. A way of holding tension without rushing to resolve it.  
Perhaps this is what holding the line really means in Victor’s work: keeping contact with something  
unstable as it trembles, breaks, disappears then returns. The line sits anxiously between form and  
collapse, memory and matter, doubt and devotion. It cannot be assumed in advance. It must be  
found again and again inside each painting.  
This seems to me the quiet power of Victor’s work. It knows that coherence is temporary, and that  
the mess of being alive cannot be tidied away inside the rectangle. Still, a configuration of forms can  
hold meaning for a moment. Doubt can be wrestled with. A motif can disappear and return changed.  
And beauty, when it arrives, has passed through resistance first.  
This is why the paintings continue to matter to me after all these years. They treat faith as practice  
rather than answer. Each painting is another descent, another table, another provisional map.  
To keep painting, in this sense, is to keep faith with the possibility that something may still be found  
there. Found, then lost, then followed further. This is the line Victor keeps holding, drawn over and  
over until the act of returning becomes its own proof.  
After thirty years, what remains most compelling to me is not any single image or series. It is the  
persistence of the condition itself. The work keeps asking the same hard questions, only asking them  
differently each time. It returns without repeating. It lets go, then finds a way to continue.  
Jason Maling, Melbourne 2026.  
Jason Maling is an artist, writer and facilitator based in Naarm/Melbourne. His work spans live performance, public art,  
social practice and participatory systems, with a long-standing interest in how artworks generate attention, agency and  
relation. He is Artistic Director of Strange Engine and a founding member of the public art collective Field Theory. He studied  
painting at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, Ilam, where he first met Victor Berezovsky in the early 1990s.