Michal Helfman
Michal Helfman’s exhibition is an invitation to an atypical and disorienting spectacle, in which the visitor is like Gulliver or Alice in a land where wonder lies in the literal capsizing of real situations. The Lesson is an installation built on the principle of inversion of a classical ballet hall. What is typically the bar on which the dancer executes her harmonious exercises becomes a vertical element, thus switching into a dancing pole. The mirror to check the gracefulness of the moves is transformed into a sexy ceiling on which poses are reflected with albeit different connotations. Everything, from the linoleum floor, to the door, to the lighting is overturned, hence projecting the spectator in an ambiguous and unsteady environment. Inside the room, the video recounts the dance – inverted by ninety degrees – of a ballerina: it is a grotesque and equivocal ballet which contrasts the classical tradition – symbol of high moral values and aspiration of beauty and perfection – with pole dancing, metaphor of a vision of an erotized woman subjected to the male eye. Classical horizontality versus phallic verticality, elegance versus aggressiveness are juxtapositions which, far from carrying a moralising message, reflect on the ethical and social implications of the gaze.
The overturning of a model or of a stereotype is repeated in A Dancer, a bronze sculpture in which the famous Degas’ young ballerina is transformed into a provoking adult dressed with heels and corset, or in the drawing Ruth, where the woman becomes a grotesque and uncanny figure through the simple inversion of a paradoxically classical and feminine hairstyle. At the entrance of the exhibition the visitor is welcomed by a large mirror mountain, a work which alters the light and contributes to create an ambiguous atmosphere, on the verge between psychedelic and oniric. The mountain recalls the desert, one of the recurring themes in Helfman’s oeuvre, and it juxtaposes, just like in the encounter between axis and ballerina, figuration to a formal and abstract reading of space.
Just Be Good To Me is the title and the background litany (a version without musical accompaniment from the homonymous 80ies cult song) of the other video installation in the show: constructed through the assembly of separate frames, the video portrays the artist dressed as a dancer diapering her little son. The images focus on the contrast between the neutral environment and the colourful knick-knacks of the kitsch decoration, to then open unexpectedly on the mysterious and uncontaminated nature of the surrounding desert. The iconography of mother and child, by the setting sun whose light fades into the intimacy of an – until then – invisible lamp, references religious painting and the biblical scenes from art history but negates any narrative or linear interpretation. Also the table with its missing circles, which completes the installation, appears as a modernist fetish, an element which has lost its function to melt into the setting of the video.
In Michal Helfman’s works the image is possibility, it is a vision both contemporary and primordial of an altered, temporary and elusive world. The artist builds stages for the gaze, spaces to be filled, places in which every visitor is invited to reverse for a moment his/her own reality.
text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
The overturning of a model or of a stereotype is repeated in A Dancer, a bronze sculpture in which the famous Degas’ young ballerina is transformed into a provoking adult dressed with heels and corset, or in the drawing Ruth, where the woman becomes a grotesque and uncanny figure through the simple inversion of a paradoxically classical and feminine hairstyle. At the entrance of the exhibition the visitor is welcomed by a large mirror mountain, a work which alters the light and contributes to create an ambiguous atmosphere, on the verge between psychedelic and oniric. The mountain recalls the desert, one of the recurring themes in Helfman’s oeuvre, and it juxtaposes, just like in the encounter between axis and ballerina, figuration to a formal and abstract reading of space.
Just Be Good To Me is the title and the background litany (a version without musical accompaniment from the homonymous 80ies cult song) of the other video installation in the show: constructed through the assembly of separate frames, the video portrays the artist dressed as a dancer diapering her little son. The images focus on the contrast between the neutral environment and the colourful knick-knacks of the kitsch decoration, to then open unexpectedly on the mysterious and uncontaminated nature of the surrounding desert. The iconography of mother and child, by the setting sun whose light fades into the intimacy of an – until then – invisible lamp, references religious painting and the biblical scenes from art history but negates any narrative or linear interpretation. Also the table with its missing circles, which completes the installation, appears as a modernist fetish, an element which has lost its function to melt into the setting of the video.
In Michal Helfman’s works the image is possibility, it is a vision both contemporary and primordial of an altered, temporary and elusive world. The artist builds stages for the gaze, spaces to be filled, places in which every visitor is invited to reverse for a moment his/her own reality.
text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
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