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Helene Grove's latest exhibition is about people – people who are fearful, serene, wishful , greedy, concentrating, relaxing, content, disturbed, bored, intense, resigned or struggling. Her people float in the spaces inside their frames; anchored only by the ideas and feelings the artist entertained when she brushed her thoughts into the canvas.
Because of their discordant balance and form, these paintings have an abstract quality. In fact, if you squint out the features and expressions her people portray, they have a powerful abstract presence; and you can see more clearly her personal artistic motivation – her striving to place separate things together; to allow form to have space and space to have form.
In her large canvasses even the ideas have abstract arrangement. Asunder has dark thoughts, forbidden feelings, and an eccentrically placed fragile centre. The standing figure embraces all, while the foreground torso is stodgy and surly with a vacant amblyopic stare. All this is pressed into a complex smoldering, formless background, that sucks and flicks at the separate features, rendering them all smoke damaged and no longer desirable. It is a bleak view of marriage.
The Portrait is about a man's wish to achieve. It's about materialism ; and "the means to an end – do anything to get there" attitude that YUPPIES are credited with. In one corner, the lemon behind the fencing wire gives the obvious elements in this painting a twist (a twist of lemon?), indicating perhaps that the good life sucks even if you can get it.
Retake is disturbingly disjointed. The beautifully executed clear glass vase of flowers next to the only half-worked cruciform figure in boxer shorts demand a retake or rethink