Arie Hellendoorn & Victor Berezovsky | Bystanders: {Suite}

Bystanders brings together recent work by Arie Hellendoorn and Victor Berezovsky, close friends for more than thirty years. The exhibition offers insight into how decades of studio visits and ongoing dialogue may have encouraged a degree of cross-pollination, giving viewers an opportunity to better understand their respective approaches.

The title of the exhibition was chosen as both artists often incorporate a figurative form—a bystander—within their paintings, a figure that acts as a spectator for the drama unfolding around it. While this figure frequently occupies a central role, each artist approaches the motif, and the space surrounding it, in markedly different ways.

Arie’s recent work has become increasingly jewel-like; the scale more intimate, and the staging quieter and more concentrated. He continues to situate his miniature dramas within tightly controlled architectural interiors, often divided by windows, doorways, or partitions that offer glimpses of landscape or nature beyond. The Dutch made this device, ‘doorzien’ which means “to see through” famous in the seventeenth century. Adding to the sense of drama, Arie has increasingly blended this tradition with subtle traces of Surrealism: a window recalling Magritte, a figure exposed as though by X-ray, or an echo of Dalí in the bodily juxtaposition of disparate objects.

Importantly, what gives Arie’s paintings their enduring resonance is not simply his selection of motifs or sense of narrative, but the extraordinary quality of their surfaces. The closer one looks, the more the images seem to dissolve into meticulously constructed layers of paint, creating a shimmering, shifting materiality that lends the works their distinctive character.

In contrast Victor’s paintings occupy a more physically abstracted and expressionistic space. He, too, employs a recognisable personal lexicon of objects, but his forms relate more closely to a folk-art tradition and his family’s personal history. Shawled or hooded figures, walking sticks, ropes, and bowls help locate and define the pictorial space. His environments, however, are less clearly delineated, less concrete, and more prone to dissolution. There is a greater willingness to surrender to the abstract possibilities of both form and surface: how shapes are rendered, how paint is worked, and how the image is ultimately held together.

Bystanders shows two distinct approaches and contrasting personal temperaments in addressing a universal theme: how we represent ourselves within our environments, and what those representations reveal about us as both observers and creators.