”It’s as if Helen’s paintings make time stop. Everything is suspended because there are hardly any imposing textures, porous boundaries or troubled landscapes; no grand authorial gestures, overcooked concepts or expressionist outbursts. There is a desire to see and to give to see in her contained gestures, more than to be seen and to give herself to see.

Everything seems quiet, as if it belongs exactly where it is, resting and at rest. But it’s not that simple. Much like the Russian Formalists’ concept of ‘estretonia’, there’s an undecidability due to the interplay of strangeness and familiarity, presence and representation. And colour, in all its relational glory and vibrancy, defies the limits of perception, playing tricks on our sense of surface and depth.

So, Helen’s paintings play tricks on us, recollectors of feelings and memories, by moving us into a kind of estrangement that reveals itself with time and attention, with attention to time, and with time for attentiveness. To me, they are a reminder of the sheer beauty of (im)permanence and unresolved alterity; of an ‘I’ or ‘us’ that is always both itself and something else; of something that can become radically different in the process of its own becoming. Jean Cocteau’s aphorism could not find a better place to rest and play than Helen’s paintings: “Mirrors should think [reflect] longer before they reflect”.  

                                                                                                                                                                       Rui – Lisbon, Portugal