Arnold Helbling at Roebling Hall - New York

A recent series of paintings by Arnold Helbling used X-ray photographs from medical textbooks as a point of departure, and those ghostly images haunt the finished canvases. In his new 2003 series shown here, Helbling, a Swiss-born artist based in New York since 1989, works from photographs of buildings. Yet associations with the external world are abbreviated to the point of notation. What remains in both series is a quirkiness of structure that hints at specific source material (although they remain abstract for the viewer), and bravura paint handling that shows Helbling's utter commitment to the rightness of the brushstroke's placement.

Certain motifs emerge in these generally sizable paintings. An oddly segmented, almost horizontal band that may refer to lintels often dominates the composition, as in the 68-by-64-inch Monument to Architecture (Homage to Bada Shanren). The hot blue dot around which this largely red-orange-on-white painting pivots is a case study in economy of means. The title refers to an eccentric, virtuoso Qing dynasty painter and calligrapher whose most radical work shows a like reduction to pictorial essentials and a similarly exuberant, muscular line.

The construction of space in Helbling's paintings is distinctive. The gesso ground is sanded smooth so that acrylic glazes bead up and acquire a high-resolution look while emphasizing the picture plane. Visually retreating to an indeterminate distance are soft-focus spots or clouds of unbroken color clunkily applied with an airbrush. In the more crowded paintings such as A Bull, A Rose, A Tempest (103 by 92 inches), this two-level spatial effect is startlingly similar to looking into a microscope, playing with the viewer's sense of scale.

Helbling's process is essentially additive. The skittering streaks and brushy splashes of color--punctuated by incidental drips and blobs--tend to remain discrete, but when they are allowed to run together, the effect is spectacular. The polarities of control and surrender to chance evoked in the paintings suggest an Eastern outlook. The artist has traveled extensively in China and Taiwan, and he compares his earlier X-ray paintings to Chinese landscapes.

A looming area of virtually untouched white gesso that constitutes nearly half of the 9-by-15-foot South of the Border, East of the Sun has the kind of visual weight often seen in Cy Twombly's work, as well as a similar equation of white void with wall. We are told that this painting required the fabrication of a brush with a paint reservoir that would allow strokes to span its length. These strokes are variations on translucent greenish blue, articulated at various points by splashes of orange, magenta and alizarin. The coloristic complexity of the work is theatrical. The scale and gestural strokes may recall Abstract Expressionism, but the overall emotional tone is cool and the effect cerebral. Rather, Helbling might be considered in the context of painters as diverse as Cecily Brown, Gary Hume and Bruce Pearson, who share a concern with ideas about legibility and who obfuscate or even deform their imagery through idiosyncratic approaches to materials.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group