Evelyna Helmer: Broken Open

‘Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill’.

Hawaii, 13th January, 2018. The artist Evelyna Helmer looked around her hotel room. There was no shelter.

Helmer focused her calm centre in the chaos. She didn’t cry or panic. Helmer thought back over her life. She had been lucky. Until now. Who survives a nuclear missile on a small island?

It was of course a false alarm, but there is something in her response to this crisis that helps us understand her new, abstract, work.

Evelyna Helmer, Open, oil and 24k gold on linen, 97 x 107cm. Courtesy the artist and Thienny Lee Gallery, Sydney

This artist’s recent move from portraits to abstraction is not as divergent as it may seem. Because these new paintings are also portraits, but of an inner state. This shift from painting outer form to inner state is significant. Tony Tuckson said that abstraction is the legitimate goal of artists. ‘If you’d mentioned that to me before I’m not sure I’d have agreed, because I wasn’t feeling it.’ Helmer responds, ‘But I am. It feels very exciting. This work feels true and authentic.’

Her paintings’ backgrounds are thickly and intuitively painted with a palette knife in tones of one strong colour. In the middle of this wildness is a hiatus – a very smoothly painted, focused motif with strongly defined edges – usually a triangle, square or lingham.

These motifs invite us to follow Helmer on her inward dive. From the surrounding tumult of the built-up surface we plunge into an untroubled pool. There is a moment of stasis – and then we shift back through.

Evelyna Helmer, Now, oil on linen board, 51 x 75cm. Courtesy the artist and Thienny Lee Gallery, Sydney

Geometric shapes like squares carry conceptual and cultural weight: in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, for instance, the square represents the physical, the earth. Here again is her interest in the edges of shapes and the dialogue and reflections they set up in her new art works.

In Now white vertical marks reach down across exposed areas of brown linen ground towards a white square, and then on into more fluid white areas below.

Tacenda has a different, intense, vibe. As does Open. With its 24carat gold paint, it is a nod to the Japanese practice of kintsugi in which broken pottery is repaired using precious metals. The metaphor is clear: our lives are damaged by disappointment, lost opportunities, and grief. But we are able to transform and be enriched by this damage. Those experiences can be transformative.

Evelyna Helmer, Tacenda, oil on canvas 30.5 x 40.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Thienny Lee Gallery, Sydney

Some call this is the time of the older women artist. Last year, at 101, Carmen Herrera finally got her retrospective at the Whitney Museum, New York. Evelyna Helmer is a long way off 101, but agrees that older artists have much to offer collectors. Having achieved maturity and seriousness through experience they’re not going to burn out. They are reflective, resilient, confident – sanguine, in life and in art.

Sonia Legge is an art adviser, valuer and writer.

Thienny Lee Gallery
26 April to 15 May, 2018
Opening on the Thursday 26 April, 6-8pm
Sydney

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