Painting in an Emergency

Make Heads or Tails Of  by Johanna Helmuth

Perhaps, no other artist of her generation has painted the domestic sphere—its drama, its tension, its tenderness—more acutely than Johanna Helmuth. Her technique, which involves the vigorous application of paint with the palette knife, mirrors the flawed and unadorned portrait of everyday life. The rough-hewn surface of her work vibrates with intense and instinctive figuration. What the viewer sees is not the world faithfully translated but one that is deliberated and processed upon by a raw and perceptive sensibility.  

In her new solo exhibition, Make Heads or Tails Of, the domestic is the stomping ground of Helmuth’s meditation, but this time shadowed by the menace of a pandemic. Global economy—with its seemingly tireless machinery—grinds into a halt. People, who may be carriers and vectors of the novel coronavirus, are ordered to stay home. The home becomes the sole space in which one has to re-imagine and reconfigure the contours of one’s life. As days bleed into the other, routine activities are charged with significance. Privacy becomes paramount. “All works,” says the artist, “are borne of solitude, change of plans since the lockdown, and making it out of the situation day-by-day.”

As a way to triumph over the tedium of the everyday, daily activities now carry importance they never before had. In the work, “Begin Again,” the routine of ablution becomes an opportunity to start fresh and afresh, freeing the bather from the grimes of the past.  Drying her hair with a sliver of towel, her head slightly tilted, the figure nonchalantly concludes bathing as a kind of ceremony. The sculpture version of the figure is shown with an arrow piercing her back—a suggestion that love has struck.

Self-portraiture is, in a way, self-reflection, which carries with it an examination of a probable future. With much of people’s planned schedules cancelled or indefinitely postponed, one is constrained to focus on the present, as reflected by the works, “What I Can in a Day,” “I’ve Got This,” and “One Never Arrives.”  In the last work, a figure is shown seated on a monoblock chair and framed by the window bars, quizzically looking at the middle distance, with her arm propped by a knee and her languid fingers similar to those of Adam in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man. For Helmuth, the work finds solace in never arriving, in perpetually seeking, and in making self-improvement an open-ended goal, with neither a deadline nor a destination.

This reconciliation with the unknown is also evident in “Whichever Direction,” which shows a figure negotiating a flight of stairs, either ascending or descending it, but not without pausing momentarily to throw a gaze at the viewer. No matter what the direction the figure takes is valid, argues Helmuth, who was partly inspired by a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”  

The pandemic, while it forces us to confront the self, also redefines our views and relationships with other people. In “Catching Tears,” a young figure (the artist) is shown propping up a mature one (her mother) with what seems to be a walker as a metaphor of supporting the latter in her grief over the passing of loved one, whose funeral, because of the lockdown, was impossible to attend. The work, “Hope Against Hope,” is a portrait of a young boy (Helmuth’s friend, Jeboy, who is based in Cebu), donning the now prevalent mask, but which is drawn to the chin, conveying both danger and safety.

The exhibition, as the title suggests, is the artist’s attempt to “make heads or tails” of the world during the pandemic, forming resolutions along the way once it is over. All the certainties we thought we had have suddenly vanished, forcing us to deal with a version of reality that did not previously exist. Make Heads or Tails Of, while it is a chronicle of a life during this once-in-a-lifetime human disaster, is also a psychological and emotional examination and exposure of the artist’s own vulnerabilities. It confronts the wound of mortality, “the place where,” as ascribed to the poet and philosopher Rumi, “the light enters us.”

– Carlomar Arcangel Daoana