Hélène Muheim — À propos — Slash Paris

Solo show,
Du 15 septembre au 15 Octobre 2022
Galerie Valérie Delaunay,
42 rue de Montmorency, Paris

Somewhere in the Unfinished

Exploring unknown regions, traversing forests, skirting lakes, climbing mountains, overlooking valleys… Hélène Muheim’s latest drawings are an invitation to explore imaginary landscapes, though exactly where they begin and end is unclear. Resembling Rorschach tests, they are divided into two principal planes placed one above the other, mirroring each other but not symmetrical. Roots, foliage, tree trunks, rocks, and layers of cloud intertwine in all directions, creating organic compositions that swarm with detail but whose overall outlines remain indistinct. From a distance, the impression is one of a certain tranquility, but closer observation of the complex mesh of forms and lines reveals interweaving worlds that endlessly invite the gaze to travel.

To give substance to these landscapes, the artist adds masses of color to her smooth, velvety paper, using ink mixed with graphite. With delicacy and precision, she then calls forth part-natural, part-artificial scenes from those colored areas. Finally, she adds eyeshadow here and there, creating the effect of a diaphanous light that traverses the elements she has drawn, choosing essentially pastel tones of the kind used to colorize photographs. By “making up” her drawings in this way, she symbolically metamorphoses the worlds she depicts into living organisms, accentuating both their poetry and their strangeness. Sometimes, they are adorned with lace-like patterns inspired by x-rays of her own bones, attesting to the connection between human and nature, turning these landscapes into places where collective and individual memories merge.

The exhibition “Somewhere in the Unfinished” presents a 29-meter horizon line punctuated by multiple landscapes. This circular installation, specifically designed for the Valérie Delaunay gallery, invites us to wander from image to image, experiencing each one along the way, while the line creates a panorama that heightens our awareness of our relationship to the world.
Hanging side by side, in one piece or in several modules, each work contains the image of a floating world, stretched out lengthwise, in which the artist disregards scale and condenses her numerous references. The latter range from memories of her own travels to iconographic elements from art history: Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Chinese painting, picturesque eighteenth-century European paintings… Her formal vocabulary also encompasses imaginary motifs.
The worlds that Hélène Muheim calls into being lie somewhere between reality and fiction, circumventing the cultural construction of the landscape, demonstrating that the latter always depends on the perception and interpretation of reality, fluctuating between objectivity and subjectivity. The idea is not to reproduce reality or create accurate documentary images, but to transcribe physical, mental, and imagined experiences, with intense but delicate gestures. To paraphrase the Chinese painter and calligrapher Dong Qichang (1555-1636), “The artist whose hand draws freely transmits the spirit of the landscape.” The impression of incompletion that stems from the indistinct edges of the valleys, forests, mountain slopes, and other landforms allows viewers to immerse themselves in these microcosms, revive the memories or stories they have to tell, and awaken all their musicality.

Thomas Fort