Thomas Helbig’s Rom emerges as a palimpsest of muted expression. Obliterated in a blizzard of gauzy brushwork, Helbig’s forms appear as half-articulate sentiments: architectural shapes, reticent drips, and mumbled textures surface through the mists as revenants of their former selves. Proposing a literally whitewashed narrative, Rom conceives landscape as intangible space, creating an epic romanticism tinged with disorienting solitude.
Commanding with a painterly dynamism, Thomas Helbig’s abstractions strive to capture the essence of power. Within his raw canvases, Helbig alludes to the unwieldy forces of nature, and the representational modes used to harness its vastness. Stylistically, Helbig recycles art history, implicating visual language as reflective of ideology: from the political subtexts of abstraction, to the religious spiritualism of romanticism. In Seele, Helbig creates a field of high drama, his blacks and blues churning with the unpredictable depth of night. Reminiscent of Turner’s climactic impressionism, Helbig’s Seele suggests both haunting landscape and stormy psychology.
Reworking the theme of Picasso’s Girl Before A Mirror, Thomas Helbig’s Wilde Mit Spiegel sets up a questionable allure, positing the perception of beauty as a consequence of excess. Hidden within an abstract field of wild brushwork and gory splatters, Helbig paints a figure, profiled as grotesque caricature. His Holbien-ish shrew is defined by her painterly construction, the mimetic qualities of the media bubbling as boils and warts, crackling like matted hair; above her head a chandelier of gobby yellow suggests tarnished halo. To the left, an orange vignette doubles as figurative mirror and comic speech bubble brandishing a sketchy image of pleasantry.
Thomas Helbig’s Jung Frau offers a morbid fascination. Using the textural contrasts of materials, Helbig creates a biomorphic abstraction veering between charred and fossilised remain and science fiction species. Embedding smooth moulded forms in rough globular material, Jung Frau possesses a tactile physicality at odds with itself: fragile and brutal, elevated and primitive. Coated in high gloss black paint, Helbig’s sculpture is both sinister and humorous, suggesting apocalyptic narratives that are glamorous and abject.
Conclusion:
At first glance Thomas Helbig’s sculptures appear to be futuristic ruins; bizarre and broken finds hinting at some remote gothic civilisation, glorifying its defunct authority.
what to Do Next. . .
Read more information about Thomas Helbig paintaings and ehibitions at
http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/thomas_helbig. htm
