Helen Blake: Let the Rules Be Soft
Molesworth Gallery, Dublin
★★★★★
“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
These lines from Poetics of Music, a series of lectures that the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky gave at Harvard Universityjust after the start of the second World War, mean a lot to Helen Blake. Pair them with the name of her new solo exhibition, Let the Rules Be Soft, and you discern a key aspect of her practice: a rigorous and exactingly consistent artist, she nevertheless keeps open a space for adaptation.
Like every great painter, Blake has an immediately recognisable style. Her paintings at first glance resemble geometric game boards consisting of dozens if not hundreds of tiles, executed with formidable precision entirely by hand. She meticulously layers her work, beginning with a single-colour base that, though often invisible by the time she has finished, determines the chromatic properties of each successive pattern of gridded shapes.
Blake’s stratification process involves not merely producing shapes or patterns but also leaving gaps. The resulting intervals – structured absences – are profoundly compelling, elevating and transforming the layers beneath.
Via a careful interplay of demonstration and suggestion, Blake’s paintings induce a meditative absorption, a slow, cleansing form of contemplation. On occasion, however, the meditative can veer into the vertiginous, as the background continues to split, revealing older, ever more infinitesimal fragments.
A dialectic between the human and the inhuman is at play here. The highly ordered and intricate surfaces of Blake’s paintings evoke a machinelike sensibility, as though calculated with robotic precision. Get closer, however, and your eye picks out the imperfection of every straight line; even the edges of the canvas are applied by hand. This instils a warmth, an intimacy even, in the impersonal arrangements.
Like any true dialectic, this tension between the human and the inhuman resolves in a higher synthesis, in this case Blake’s evocation of the transcendental. She has spoken of her debt to Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painters, such as Jan van Eyck, who conjured an atmosphere of contemplative stillness.
Though in no way religious, her artworks have the air of devotional objects. The longer you stare at them, the more they take on this semblance: like prayers whispered quietly, they seem to pierce the veil of the world.
Tom Lordan
Runs at Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, until Tuesday, September 30th
