TZ: Thomas Helbig

Thomas Helbig / The Presentation / Polansky Gallery / Praha / 23. 3. - 14. 5. 2016

Thomas Helbig: The Presentation

23. 3. - 14. 5. 2016

curated by Cora Waschke

The Book of Genesis describes the origin of the world as a spectacle. Light shines in the darkness of the void, and along with it and through this light the things of life appear. In this materialisation - whether of some divine will or an artistic idea - is what has always presented itself to human beings as an insoluble contradiction: the representation of the spiritual by means of things. In the visual arts, this contradiction has been encountered in various ways: in the form of mimesis, in other words to likewise create a world by means of perfect imitatio – a prime example in painting being the tale in which Parrhasius outdid Zeuxis, his rival in painting, with a deceptively realistically painting of a curtain – or by contrast, to represent the spiritual through abstraction and concretion. In a present in which things dissolve in the concretion of pixels and abstraction of binary codes in order to visualise perfect spatial simulations, the issue of the spiritual for art has by no means been rendered obsolete, on the contrary, it has been intensified instead.

In Thomas Helbig’s current work, the issue of representation turns out to be an issue of presentation. The spectacle of presentation emerges in his spray-paintings on velvet. On textiles that are used in theatres as in churches, effects of light and shadow both accentuate and negate - as sprayed illusions and interplay of the textile with real light - the boundary between the space of the image and that of the observer. Bundles and points of light call to mind the lens flares that in photographs reference the material and apparative origin of representation. They are like spotlights on the closed curtain in theatres and cinemas that denote the act of presentation prior to the spectacle itself. In Helbig’s works, the absence of things manifests by means of negative forms in a misty cloud of spray. The object placed on the pictorial ground is removed after the spraying. The vanished object is rendered visible in its absence, not in its representation; a strategy that is the opposite of mimetic painting. The observer’s own imagination replaces the empty space of the immaterial impression. The things that Helbig has caused to vanish are sacred and profane pieces (of jewellery), in other words, things that can have an ideal value above and beyond their materiality. This ideal value is often generated by the reflectivity of these objects, since it is light that has the ability to symbolise the divine in and through the things of this world.

Whereas Helbig’s paintings reference a transcendental immateriality as well as the disappearance of things in the now, his sculpture appears as a deformation of figures, replete with materiality. Like a magnet, it seems to draw the objects of the vanished world of things from the vacuum of images and to drive them into collision with each other until they rupture. This stream of destruction is endless, because the stream of reproduction from which these kitsch and knick-knack objects originate also never stops. The assembly-line has been brought to a stand-still in the static sculpture. The fragments constitute a collaged homunculus, on whose totality an unfamiliar, alien aura adheres.

Cora Waschke, 2016