Hélène Muheim — À propos — Slash Paris

Solo show,
From March 13 to April 12, 2025
Galerie Valérie Delaunay,
20 rue Chapon, Paris

* We’ll keep on blooming !*

It is at this precise moment that one can leave the shore and immerse oneself in the infinite intricacy of its dense undergrowth, which unfolds like fantastic landscapes. While they may evoke the picturesque imagery of the discovery of the New World, they manage to transcend this illustrative aesthetic and take us on a journey nourished by the lightness of images from the floating world of Japanese art. Large in size, the drawings unfurl like kakemonos or living membranes. Moving islands, playing with the delicate balance between fullness and emptiness, carrying with them an imagination drawn from the Indian jungle that has fascinated the artist for 20 years. And if we initially stayed at the shore, we now fall into it, or rather, we succumb to it. Indeed, their shores, that is, their contours, are irregular, uncertain, difficult to define. No frame.

Free elections, impermanent inner worlds. “In the heart of the jungle in India, it was an oceanic feeling that overtook me, just as described by Romain Rolland and Freud,” she confides, describing a powerful connection of her body with nature. “It happened like a birth, or a rebirth to the world.” Now, we are inside too, immersed in these otherworldly places with endless foliage where incessant pareidolia appears. Monkeys, birds, figures…? One never tires of the meticulousness of the lines she applies in ink and colors and softens with eyeshadow. It’s no coincidence that we are captivated by these adornments. “I make up the world,” she says with a laugh. The sheet of paper becomes the artist’s second skin, on which she explores the golden cities hidden within the landscape. Like a perpetual renewal of the ephemeral that we have loved so much and, once it has disappeared, we realize it was the latent image of happiness.

Hélène Muheim’s drawings thus stand, fragile and delicate, on this in-between of ephemeral beauty and lingering, persistent images. In the great tradition of romantic traveling artists, who loved painting the details of the world, she offers us, in this new exhibition, her poetic vision of elsewhere, suspended between two worlds, the memorial and the imaginary, never truly fixed, leaving us at the edge, in a softly unfulfilled contemplation.

Excerpt from the text by Julie Chaizemartin
Journalist and Art Critic,
February 2025