As part of the program “Autumn at Palazzo Fortuny“
From September 1st to November 19th 2012
Béatrice Helg
Risonanze
The work of Swiss artist Béatrice Helg holds a unique place within the tradition of staged and constructed photography, first developed in the 1980s. Indeed her photographs are a far cry from hyperrealist or narrative pictures, from artificial reconstructions of scenes of everyday life; instead, her work features abstract forms and sceneries as well as luminous worlds.
For Orthodox believers, the icon is a window on the invisible. And this is the image that comes to mind when we consider Béatrice Helg’s abstract architecture and its vibrant, otherworldly silence. Right from her early works, the artist has long succeeded like no one else in combining matter and theatre, or reality and vision. With her great passion for scenography and architecture, influenced by the Russian avant-garde and constructivism, Helg creates monumental spaces in which sculpture, painting, environment, staging and most of all light are constantly interwoven.
More than anything else, light is the real material without which her work would not exist. Light is the ultimate medium that makes revelation possible. Using raw, salvaged materials such as corroded metal sheets, unevenly transparent glass plates, or paper, the artist constructs unlikely installations in her studio, poised in a fragile equilibrium. These sculptural and geometric shapes seem to float, suspended out of real time. They inhabit the space rather than occupying it as inert objects. Beatrice Helg’s tableaux seem to be haunted by the contradiction between light and darkness, ultimately giving way to infinity, to a quest for the absolute, or rather to a boundless search for inner mystery.
“Risonanze” is Helg first exhibition in an Italian Museum. It includes a selection of twenty-four colour works, many of them are unreleased photographs, specially created by the artist for Palazzo Fortuny.