EVA HELKI                                                                                                   CV  PROJECTS  WORKS  CONTACTS


The Island

Solo exhibition
Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 2020
curator Sofiya Kovaleva





The Рersonal as the Mythical

Everything flows and nothing stays.
Heraclitus of Ephesus

Works by Eva Helki are embodiments of mythical stories and archetypes, with her close friends as characters. On the one hand, this seems like a collection of ancient historical narratives, told as projections onto the present-day reality. On the other, this is a much more sophisticated and intimate story, woven from various metamorphoses that happen to the characters in it. The depicted protagonists, representing mythological narratives, are hiding behind a deceptive cypher of modern daily life and mundane details. The metamorphoses that they undergo are an artistic attempt at hermeneutic studies, interpreting the ancient myths through down-to-earth emotional experiences.

The power of the Jungian archetype turns out to be absolute and all-encompassing. Humanity as a species is bound to endlessly relive the scenarios well established from time immemorial in the religious mythologies that solidified and explained some aspects of psychology, behavioral and relational patterns. The surviving legends have not only been rooted in the world folklore and reflected in the cultural code but also become part of our collective unconscious. So, speaking metaphorically, any of our desires, affinities, images and fears are primeval stories relived.

This proposition would not surprise anyone today as we have got used to all statements being hypertexts that refer to other, earlier ideas and thoughts. The culture of postmodernism appears to leave no room for genuine novelty or original ideas.

Yet, the aesthetic of Eva’s works is closer to reverent attention, which she pays to metamorphoses as a process, rather than to another restatement of timeless values that have been expressed through myth. The artist tends to show instances of incomplete transformation, as if oscillating between the past and the future, between understatement and finality, beginning and end. This is more than a stylized archeology of knowledge, emotion, rumination; this work is more sophisticated and sensuous—a depiction of an incomplete process as an attempt at delaying its outcome.

This desire to capture the metamorphose itself founds manifestation in Eva’s medium of choice: in her paintings on plywood, the foreground and background overlay to form something in between a canvas and an assemblage. This two-fold effect is aided by introduction of other materials as well: mirrors, plexiglass, tempera. The setting and context for these works can thus be easily changed and rearranged; the characters are then untethered from any specific topos— the only important thing is what is happening with them. This desire to capture the metamorphose itself founds manifestation in Eva’s medium of choice: in her paintings on plywood, the foreground and background overlay to form something in between a canvas and an assemblage. This two-fold effect is aided by introduction of other materials as well: mirrors, plexiglass, tempera. The setting and context for these works can thus be easily changed and rearranged; the characters are then untethered from any specific topos— the only important thing is what is happening with them.

This is also linked to the subject matter of the works as Eva paints the spaces of Vasilevskiy Island in St. Petersburg, where she lives, and draws comparison with the Fortunate Isles—an old utopian idea of a sacred land beyond reach where serenity and prosperity reign. An island as an isolated mysterious world, where mystique co-exists with reality and the stone sphinxes, as they have been for thousands of years, guard the souls of the dead as well as those who are yet to undergo this final metamorphose. Along the same lines, Dante’s Divine Comedy represents the Purgatory as an island—a liminal, third place between Hell and Heaven, where the deceased worshippers are cleansed of their sins and prepared to enter Heaven. This is another transmutational process related to change and transformation.

There is no doubt about the precision of Eva’s artistic rendering of legends and fables, or about her interpretational prowess—since early childhood she has been into studying the Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies, in parallel with other religious and historical legends. However, this indirect storytelling does more than just reflect her life’s events and changes. It is important for Eva to feel and capture the very process of metamorphose as a state, before the heroes complete the transformation dictated by the myth, which means that it can still be reversed, for example, by artistic means. This is where her academic training in monumental painting and drawing finds an application. As Eva puts it, “the head needs to be free, and the hands—to do it all,” meaning that this freedom to perform actions of any complexity, do anything and everything, even freeze time and depict the processes of endless transformation can only be attained through sharp skill, discipline and perfectionism.

In Eva’s work the mimetic is intertwined with the mystical, and the personal with the mythical. Together, these opposites form the world of the multiple archetypes that survive from other eras and roam among us. This world is its own projection onto Vasilevskiy Island, a utopian island of the blessed where the people in paintings are frozen still, sheer moments before their metamorphose is finally complete.

Artur Knyazev