Helēna Heinrihsone. Exhibition “Hello, Mole!”
Vilnis Vējš, Art Critic
|
| | | I had the opportunity of viewing Helēna Heinrihsone's works of art from the year 2007 in two different situations - in the artist's own studio before the opening of her solo exhibition "Hello, Mole!", and soon afterwards, at the opening of the show. On each occasion the impressions were different. Firstly, picture a late evening hour at the artist's studio, with a lantern lighting the corners of the attic, and the artist pulling out enormous canvases with frightening visions: primitive male torsos, freakishly coloured skulls, and elusive amarant-hine nothingness with dark, lifeless and spindly silhouettes, which only remotely looked like supernaturally large dead roses. Helēna shared her own bewilderment - where did it all come from? - especially those male bodies.... Less than a month later, Heinrihsone's works were in the White Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art. The enormous canvases seemed to be optically smaller, and viewed against the background of white walls they looked more like "carnival delights" (Eduards Kļaviņš). |
| |  Helēna Heinrihsone. The Yellow. Oil on canvas. 2007. |
| | It turned out that with her series of wilted roses the artist hadn't killed her former trademark - the queen of all flowers - but had subjected them to a new level of sophistication and irony. Even the skulls at the far wall of the gallery, with their unrivalled chief - a yellow skull with pink teeth and a blue "eye" - reminded one more of frivolous partygoers rather than menacing ghosts. Helēna Heinrihsone honourably took on the public image of being the mistress of the "black dress parade", which is so customary at exhibition openings. The metamorphosis of her works, which I am trying to describe here, reveals their unmistakably painterly nature - as contrasted to the performance nature of conceptual art, which envisages the staging of the "show" already at its creation. Before Helēna Heinrihsone's works are presented to the public, they belong to the future - about which nothing is clearly known. There is only the artist's imagination and the ability to materialize it. There are no templates, intentions, considerations or comparisons. That is the realm of viewers and critics, each of them judging art according to their own experience (or their own corrupted perceptions), when the painting becomes fact, a part of the past, interacting with other past events. Only then are the exhausting questions raised about a work of art - whether it belongs to modernism, postmodernism or contemporary art. The expressionistic gesture, the archetypal images in Helēna Heinrihsone's works of art provide worthwhile arguments for discussions about art and its treatment of the past. At the same time, they also strengthen a faint hope that a painter's privilege is to directly engage with the future.
/Translator into English: Anita Načisčione/ |
| | | go back | |
|
