“These contrasts create an impression of a line drawn in the sand in the ambient space of the paintings.”
Permanence/Impermanence
Helka Immonen
The most prominent, often almost imperceptible tension of Helka Immonen´s paintings seems to develop when the artist, while sketching a painting, instead of attaching to either abstract or figurative form, refrains from making a statement and proceeds in silence to ask the painting´s own, innermost mind. This subtle openness brings the paintings an all but tangible feeling of boundaries—from abstract to figurative—from inside to outside—from closed to open spaces. These contrasts create an impression of a line drawn in the sand in the ambient space of the paintings. It may happen that a door is opening where there was only colour or a surface of permeating light—at the last minute and so abruptly that not even a shadow will arise. Imperceptibly a time dimension has emerged in the painting; a perspective that reveals a sight to its possibly prolonged morphogenesis in the mind of the artist. Or the process is reverse: some element from the beginning of the painting process “evaporates” and becomes almost weightless with the passing of time. The outcome still shares some of the traits of the initial phase: it is slow yet not lagging, aerial yet deep in its translucency. It is perhaps fitting to describe the spatial states thus generated as innate, and lacking all externality and artificiality.
