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StLBeacon.org
June 2010

Pannotia (detail), 2010
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches
Collection of the Artist

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Artcritcal.com
Summer 2003

Evergreens, 2003
Encaustic, acrylic & oil on linen
48 x 72 inches
Private Collection

In her eight large paintings on show at Patricia Correiea, Helene Slavin creates instant patina. Looking aged, well-used, as if they've been sitting in an attic, her works resemble maps that mischievous schoolchildren have dipped in coffee. Actually, they're built up from layers of acrylic, encaustic, and oil applied via gesture, splash, and squiggle. They appear aged because Slavin drenches her canvases with mute color.

Colors are on the brink of strident, as if seen through a scrim. Fiery yellow skies, for example, in Evergreens; luminous white in the Vermeer-inspired View of Delft; the yellow-white of the sun or whatever light source it is that illuminates the female in Stephany. With subtlety she tones down these colors. Their effect is not acerbic, as in German Expressionism, or incandescent, as in Van Gogh. Rather, the experience is of looking at a faded Gauguin Tahiti painting. Once-lustrous but no longer so, yet with intimations of past lustre.

Slavin works her surfaces to an extraordinary degree. Rather than staining the canvas like Helen Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, she literally soaks, saturates, tattoos the canvas. They look well-worked like a tapestry, pummeled to good effect. As well as the surface, she applies paint to the flip-side of the canvas where it emerges through the interstices of the linen. Moreover, she singes the surface to melt the wax. Finally, she sands and then varnishes the surface to preserve the poltergeist of the process. Think of a sunset over rubbled Pompeii preserved in ambergris.

Her strategy is at once expressionistic and conceptual. On one level, there is the sense of walking into a well-appointed Victorian reading room and finding a comfortable chair: Comfortable if not nostalgic. By dint of their size, they engulf the viewer. Sparse on detail and long on lyricism, they engage slowly, they simmer, occasionally they percolate. They induce calm, irrespective of subject matter. They are a cocksure paean to technique and virtuosity unmediated by posturing and theory.

By creating work that spans abstraction and figuration and is made with an identical technique, an identical look, an identical resonance, she abolishes historical hierarchies between abstraction and figuration. She renders moot the tension between figuration and abstraction, showing that they are two sides of the same coin, painting. Her work may flirt with abstraction but it does so the way Picasso's and Braque's did, where even their most abstract works of Analytical Cubism still maintained a purchase in representation, on tangible reality.

These works suggest the tension that animates painting today is anti-painting. The real distinction is between things that age and those that don't. Installations, especially; performances; and also, a whole genre of work that escaped commodification, like Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Schwitter's Merzbau, Duchamp's Fountain. Slavin's work embodies meanings, to borrow the phrase from Arthur Danto who extended Marcel Duchamp's conceit of retinal painting. Conceptually, the work poses an unintended homage to painting, to its endurance, its viability, the way the fact of its existence is the subtext behind every painting ever produced (just as every book printed bears some relation to each other).

As with decanted wine, time enhances the works; their implicit longevity, their duration-made-manifest, and their maturation, are in themselves part of their subject. That is painting's saving grace. All the experiments of the 20th century that changed the nature of painting could not alter one incontrovertible fact: over time paintings (and bronze sculpture) age, they acquire a patina. And perhaps, just perhaps, this patina sustains any aura that was present at its conception. Does video age to good effect before it disintegrates? What about installations and performances, how do they stand the ravages of time?

Slavin's work shows that one of painting's perennial themes is the acknowledgement of its own aging. She doesn't trumpet her genre's will-to-aura; no, suave and discreet, her work shimmers like a smoggy Milton Avery, premature, old, getting better all the time.

James Scarborough

The Red Barn, 2003
Encaustic, acrylic & oil on linen
48 x 72 inches
Private Collection

 

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Artweek
February 2001

Helene Slavin at D5 Projects

Positive and negative, the quintessence of life so beautiful and powerful, are mirrored into the subconscious by the “third eye.” Haunting blood stains of surreal ghosts roam upon loosely woven canvases bestowing breath upon death and verve into existent life. In a new series of paintings, Helene Slavin beguilingly recalls photographs from the early 1900s. These works attempt to crack timeless codes that simultaneously construct and deconstruct the vernacular of American culture.

A torn heart sweetly sealed with acrylic and wax, a walk in the snow with a raincoat and umbrella, bed sheets to comfort at the end of a weary day, a savage solider who supplies refuge: eight Zen-like pieces encompass one another and provide atmosphere in the cramped environment of Robert Berman’s gallery, D5 Projects. Slavin’s use of negative and positive space and the subjects of her abstract imagery supply painful yet joyful dreams which beckon lustfully for the presence of an open soul to reveal their hidden messages.

These works are reminiscent of early twentieth-century photo negatives; they transcend collective consciousness through the use of a monotone palette and ubiquitous yet surreal imagery. Pale, raw canvas offsets creamy white acrylic patches which are interspersed with stains, washes and a sporadic use of encaustic technique. Slavin’s elusive imagery functions the same way it was created: pigment is pushed through the backside of a canvas to become a physically discernible spirit which transcends the spiritual barriers of silent messages.

The gesture of a shadow-like silhouette in Man with Umbrella #1 is at first bleak, but then reveals itself as an iconographical artifact—one that chronicles urban life in the early 1900s. The use of color in this piece is a beacon that directs the flow of subconscious thought. A faint vision of a man in a raincoat appears holding an umbrella. This transient image seeps through the copiously dirty, ripped, worn and torn canvas to produce a figurative metaphor captured in a boundless flash of time. Wrinkled and faded tactile texture creates a familiar abstract shape meant to resemble a photo negative of an umbrella. The effects of the medium suggest a lapse of time. Void of a landscape or any site-specific information, it begs the rhetorical question: how much time has passed in these images?

Soldier with Flag (#1), 2000
Acrylic and encaustic on canvas
72 x 48 inches
Collection of the Artist

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase correlates to Slavin’s Woman Descending, #2. Here, intertwined line and shape illustrate movement; an overlapping of forms creates imagery that is both affirmed and denied, leaving the piece aloof to the specificity of time and place. Whispers of delicate feet at the bottom of Woman Descending, #2, allude to a grounding of the figure, but discerning its existence on earth, in air, or any space at all reorients the focus of the psyche. Feelings of joy and pain disappear like the vaporous clouds of a Rothko stained canvas; a desire to heal the wounded woman’s spirit hypnotizes the soul with an abominable helplessness. What corridor will cure the needy soul? Incapable of a conscious decision, the willing subconscious accepts Slavin’s restrained use of color as it leads one on a Freudian journey through canvases resembling bombed-out, barren buildings.

In these works, archetypal images like tactile, frosty photo negatives and rotting Rorschach tests reveal permeable boundaries and barriers. Turn of the century ghosts etched, scratched, and worn are intertwined with delicate yet seemingly indestructible linens; these implacable images provoke the psyche and call out a plaintive reminder of humankind’s painful past: the Holocaust. Slavin creates dynamic memories that dabble with eternal moments in time; a shaman-like medium, she recalls spirits of the past to help guide us through the course of the next century. The use of ubiquitous and universal imagery coupled with a unique manipulation of materials in Spiritus grants a recognition of hope—a hope that radiantly re-creates history and provides an opportunity to learn from the past yet steadily stride into the future.

Domenic Bruzzese

Helene Slavin: Spiritus closed November 4 at D5 Projects, Santa Monica

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Los Angeles Times
Friday, February 20, 1998

Marching On: Time passes like water: It never stands absolutely still and never takes the same shape in the same place twice.

Helene Slavin conjures the fluidity of time with precious delicacy in several of her recent paintings at Hello Artichoke. Her large portraits, Crucifixion and Pieta (each measuring up to 93 inches per side) have redeeming, energetic passages, but they lack the overall presence and potency of the smaller paintings.

Rembrandt’s Susanna, for instance, is a breathtaking, ethereal gem. An oval just 10 inches high, the painting has Susanna bathed in a cool blue aura that radiates against a ground of warm umber glazes. The contours of her figure, like her own absorbed gaze, are unfixed, contingent.

In Jack Delano Garment Worker, based on a New Deal-era photograph, Slavin transforms the documentary into a poetic near-abstraction. The worker, her head bent to her labor, has chiseled features defined by deep shadow. Her hand and the material she is working on have far less substance.

They appear to be decomposing, dissolving into minute colored granules of light. A similar phenomenon occurs in Slavin’s Madonna With Child, a luminous icon whose vaguely suggested figures radiate a spirituality independent of material presence.

Slavin titles the show “Pentimenti,” after the traces of underlying painting that remain visible through subsequent layers and glazes. It’s an apt metaphor for the visible residue of times’ persistent accrual.

Leah Ollman