An energy of liberation runs through modern painting. Initially, and perhaps most strikingly, it is evident in the freeing of colour and form from the labour of representation. Once begun this liberatory process doesn’t stop, however, and eventually it hits the integrity of the medium itself, dissolving its defining
characteristics. Observed through a ‘thermodynamic’ lense, the evolutionary arch of modern painting can be seen as the medium’s struggle to survive as an identifiable unity while adapting to the emancipatory and uprooting repurcussions of industrial modernity.
As a result, painting’s internal coherence, the givenness of its material composition and craft, is exchanged for external (mainly economic) pressures as means to hold it together as a recognisable thing. Turned fluid and aimless, painting in modernity begs containment, not by tube, canvas, and métier, but by recipient structures like discourse, gallery, museum, fair, and collection. In other words, its strategies are increasingly attuned to relations that reward the immediacy of gesture over careful
depiction. The drive towards abstraction in modernist painting is then not principally a symptom of rarifaction – i.e. painting withdrawing from a broader public sphere – but, ultimately, an optimisation of aesthetic efficiency and reach.
Fast forward a hundred-plus years: In Sebastian Helling’s paintings a restless pursuit of visual hooks is front and centre; read through its quick, often impasto and sloppy facture his work is emphatically not about contemplation but completion, about moving through and on, to the next, and the next. There are marks of frustration and hesitance to be found, for sure, surfaces worked and reworked to the point of oversaturation, thick lines in fatty oils that whimsically trace dissolving figures, seeking a closure that never fully arrives, then layered over with semi-transparent fields as if to erase or rewind, and try again. In short, Helling’s canvases are packed with manual effort.
Still, any doubt or pause they attest to is inextricably tied to painting as a physical act. Whatever impedes the process, it is imperative that it is solved on canvas, in the act, and not through consideration at a remove. Helling thinks painting in and through its constitutive matter, which means that it isn’t actually only he who thinks but a cooperative endeavour – and, importantly, one in which painter, in a sense, is subservient to the medium. A strange transfer of agency takes place if we accept this reversal; it admits that painting knows best what needs to be done. The painter-subject is dissolved in the productive flows of a visual culture marked by ever-shrinking transaction times, where decision-making is indistinguishable from simple reflex.
Helling’s generously, sometimes ridiculously, sized acronymic signature answers a call for volume and impact. Its proportions mock pretensions of authorship while capitalising on the value-creating potential of artist name in an economy where brand and image are interchangeable. Using Helling as vessel, painting paints its escape from the constraints of the archaic framings of intention and originator, while at the same time exploiting the commercial appeal of these vestiges. This cues us to the possible meaning of the cartoonish skulls and disembodied, empty stares that populate Helling’s paintings: They signify the artist as hollowed-out vessel.
The painter has become a mere means for painting to make more of itself, a surrogate womb spitting out endless reams of painting-babies. In fact, baby is a fitting metaphor for what takes place on canvas too. The undeniable cuteness of Helling’s images, that is their ability to elicit attachments on first view, is emblematic of contemporary painting’s self-reproduction scheme, how it attracts resources: Helling’s canvases are unedited recordings of a search for visual immediacy on the behest of a medium that refuses to slip into redundancy, to uncover and mobilise the surface effects that best accomplish the memetic success needed to perpetuate it in a world where all power is, eventually, ceded to the commodity.
— Stian Gabrielsen —
Art Critic