JED PERL
647
form language to encompass everything he saw when he looked
around at the world. The paintings of the early sixties - figures, still
lifes, groups in the fields and harbors and markets-are drawn in
curved slaps of paint. The extremist personality that was drawn first
to abstraction and later to sharp-focus realism is nowhere in
evidence. These canvases are a little too even in tone; your eye
wanders across them, without quite getting engaged. The atmo–
sphere is airier, more informal than anywhere else in Helion's work.
There's an almost vulgar lust for pure vision that we know from
Vlaminck or the later Vuillard (maybe that's another side of Helion's
extremism); missing is the wonderful hum of ideas that generally
gives a deeper dimension to Helion's work. He moves, in 1962, to
the town of Bigeonette, near Chartres; but he can't really convince
us of a modern pastoral, as Balthus does in the Chassy landscapes,
or Braque does in the late paintings of fields. He's an artist waiting
for inspiration to strike. And when it does, in the late sixties and
seventies, Helion returns to urban themes in a series of triptychs of
street life that are to his oeuvre what
Paris sans fin
is to Giacometti's
and
Le Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre
is to Balthus's. The love affair
with Paris goes on .
All through his career Helion kept copious notebooks in which
he made sketches and jotted down interpretations of his own work
and reflections on the course of his career.
In
1964, on the threshold
of his great series of triptychs, he wrote a beautiful call-to-arms for a
new heroic representational painting. (The translation, by J0hn
Ashbery, was published in the important short-lived magazine,
Art
and Literature.)
We would like, of course, to paint
complete
works, in the style of
Carpaccio, Masaccio, Velazquez, Gericault . Technically, it is
not utterly impossible. Spiritually, it is refused to us.
Something fundamental has gone wrong. Each time a painting
moves in this direction we must rub it out, return to plans that
are both simpler and more complex; to firmer notions of space ,
to a tenser and less explicit degree of representation, the only one
our senses can bear today.
Finally we must break off all relations with nostalgia. The can–
vas is not an open window giving onto the room in which the
still-life sits. It is a bare wall, or a public square in which the im–
age will be built like a monument.
Keep your distance from the inspiring object, that distance
which allows liberty without depriving it of its force.
