The show is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini movie “Salò” and it is composed by a series of new paintings and sculptures. Helbig’s work is a combination of contradictions and intimacy: the elegant decoration reminds the Baroque churches and, at the same times, it evokes the dreamlike atmosphere of Pasolini’s movie.
Thomas Helbig’s precisely composed, semi-abstract paintings provoke a feeling of confusion and fascination in the viewer. The soft, muted geometric shapes and colors that stretch and blur over the surface of his wooden panels look slightly adrift, as if in the process of emerging from a backdrop of uncertainty, rife with possibility. Though anchored around portraits, landscapes or art historical subjects, his compositions suggest an eerie, remote intangibility. Helbig has said that his paintings “are about reduction to an unrecognizable state from which something new can then evolve”. Concealing in order to reveal something, encrypting in order to make something visible. His ethereal brushwork, gauzy tones and subdued palette oscillate between hiding and unveiling familiar forms. Some of his paintings are rooted in teach-yourself art manuals, yet instead of focusing on precise copying he leaves the works unfinished, in a state of engagement with abstraction and a sort of larger-than-life open-endedness.
