.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The Unnamable
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die. H.P.L.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), the progenitor of science fiction as we know it, has written with wry humor and a truly weird, a sarcastic kind of melancholia against the complacency of the "orthodox sun-dwellers". His own "parched and terrible valleys" unfold and stretch under the moon or the darkest sun - the black star of midday phantoms and fantasies, perfectly hidden in the intense heat, and the brightest light. His language grasps cold apparitions and molds them into warm matter, tangible and fleshy, albeit metamorphic and undefiable. "The shriekingly unnamable" is the Lovecraftian sentence that comes to mind when one stands in front of a work like Thomas Helbig's Untitled, 2005. Is this blasphemy against nature or a peon to its infinite possibilities?
Helbig's tamed maelstrom of oil, sipping into its found wood-base and spilling over its confines and onto the frame, suggests an eternal time where, to quote Lovecraft, "all that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously". Helbig's work has often been associated with Gaspar David Friedrich's mournful romanticism, the Freudian uncanny, Promethean fire, German "moral egotism", Pasolini's decadent visions, Rothko's abstracted melancholia, Holderlin's apocalyptic lyricism, Sebald's ongoing vistas, Baroque mood and even with the post-punk band Cocteau Twins and their dark operatic ethereality.
Whatever the echoes, as the work in question shows, Helbig persistently paints the unnamable fabric of reality and its tears, failings and figurations. Where his sculptures are amalgams of discarded materials and multiple view points, forcing the viewer to move around them in an expedition of cautious discovery, his paintings are luring invitations to a latent meaning and its foggy space. Untitled, 2005 can be about an alien space ship, a gothic ruin reflected in a lake, Lovecraft's mountains of madness, a monstrous tail emerging from rotting weeds, a disastrous oil spill around a broken machine, a high music note drowning in noise or just the artist's brush teasing us with its craving for what could be. The obscurity of the subject together with the gloomy, nocturnal color tones suggest what the lack of a title denies: Helbig is pretending to be a simple medium, an oracle while he is secretly but stubbornly struggling with the energies flowing within and around. This artist, as others at the turn of the 21st century, has often claimed that his works "just happen" and this by itself sounds like the quirky, anachronistic, hide-n-seek mysticism of someone at once commanding and powerless; someone who tries to make sense out of chaos and so retakes the fall as often as possible, in order to reinstate the real in all its absurd fictionality. A known collector of everyday paraphernalia Helbig desires nothing less than to bring together the pieces and use them in order to ordain a world that keeps slipping into its original amorphous state. His Untitled, 2005, as most of his paintings of this series, recalls Francis Bacon's definition of the experiment as an accident that one seeks deliberately to create (in Novum Organum, 1620, Bacon's magnum opus on scientific method inspired by Aristotle's work). The artist, like the 17th c. scientist attempts to catch up with what happens embracing the mystery of the event and his own role in it. Reducing something to its essentials is an alchemist's process and Helbig embraces it while dissecting the cadaver of the real (in Latin cadāver and accidēns come from the common route cadĕre, meaning "to fall"). Helbig's art finds its elective affinities among Roberto Matta's vertiginous inscapes, the anguished biomorphism of Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko's misty expressionism and possibly go as far as El Greco's sober, eccentric tonalities or the writings of the revolutionaries of science fiction. Looking at Untitled, 2005 and its spectral weight and shapeless concretness it is not difficult to recall and understand what has been written for one of those visionaries: "There is never an entity in Lovecraft that is not in some fashion material" (S.T.Joshi, New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. Edited by David Simmons. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan; 2013)
Nadja Argyropoulou
September 2015
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die. H.P.L.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), the progenitor of science fiction as we know it, has written with wry humor and a truly weird, a sarcastic kind of melancholia against the complacency of the "orthodox sun-dwellers". His own "parched and terrible valleys" unfold and stretch under the moon or the darkest sun - the black star of midday phantoms and fantasies, perfectly hidden in the intense heat, and the brightest light. His language grasps cold apparitions and molds them into warm matter, tangible and fleshy, albeit metamorphic and undefiable. "The shriekingly unnamable" is the Lovecraftian sentence that comes to mind when one stands in front of a work like Thomas Helbig's Untitled, 2005. Is this blasphemy against nature or a peon to its infinite possibilities?
Helbig's tamed maelstrom of oil, sipping into its found wood-base and spilling over its confines and onto the frame, suggests an eternal time where, to quote Lovecraft, "all that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously". Helbig's work has often been associated with Gaspar David Friedrich's mournful romanticism, the Freudian uncanny, Promethean fire, German "moral egotism", Pasolini's decadent visions, Rothko's abstracted melancholia, Holderlin's apocalyptic lyricism, Sebald's ongoing vistas, Baroque mood and even with the post-punk band Cocteau Twins and their dark operatic ethereality.
Whatever the echoes, as the work in question shows, Helbig persistently paints the unnamable fabric of reality and its tears, failings and figurations. Where his sculptures are amalgams of discarded materials and multiple view points, forcing the viewer to move around them in an expedition of cautious discovery, his paintings are luring invitations to a latent meaning and its foggy space. Untitled, 2005 can be about an alien space ship, a gothic ruin reflected in a lake, Lovecraft's mountains of madness, a monstrous tail emerging from rotting weeds, a disastrous oil spill around a broken machine, a high music note drowning in noise or just the artist's brush teasing us with its craving for what could be. The obscurity of the subject together with the gloomy, nocturnal color tones suggest what the lack of a title denies: Helbig is pretending to be a simple medium, an oracle while he is secretly but stubbornly struggling with the energies flowing within and around. This artist, as others at the turn of the 21st century, has often claimed that his works "just happen" and this by itself sounds like the quirky, anachronistic, hide-n-seek mysticism of someone at once commanding and powerless; someone who tries to make sense out of chaos and so retakes the fall as often as possible, in order to reinstate the real in all its absurd fictionality. A known collector of everyday paraphernalia Helbig desires nothing less than to bring together the pieces and use them in order to ordain a world that keeps slipping into its original amorphous state. His Untitled, 2005, as most of his paintings of this series, recalls Francis Bacon's definition of the experiment as an accident that one seeks deliberately to create (in Novum Organum, 1620, Bacon's magnum opus on scientific method inspired by Aristotle's work). The artist, like the 17th c. scientist attempts to catch up with what happens embracing the mystery of the event and his own role in it. Reducing something to its essentials is an alchemist's process and Helbig embraces it while dissecting the cadaver of the real (in Latin cadāver and accidēns come from the common route cadĕre, meaning "to fall"). Helbig's art finds its elective affinities among Roberto Matta's vertiginous inscapes, the anguished biomorphism of Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko's misty expressionism and possibly go as far as El Greco's sober, eccentric tonalities or the writings of the revolutionaries of science fiction. Looking at Untitled, 2005 and its spectral weight and shapeless concretness it is not difficult to recall and understand what has been written for one of those visionaries: "There is never an entity in Lovecraft that is not in some fashion material" (S.T.Joshi, New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. Edited by David Simmons. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan; 2013)
Nadja Argyropoulou
September 2015