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PARTISAN REVIEW
In his self-portrait
H~lion
is balanced in motion, equilibrated in the
act of thinking. Camus wrote that "the revolutionary spirit felt that...
there was consent in art [history]; that there was risk [in] contempla–
tion counterbalancing action." Like his
Au cyciiste,
Hdion is momen–
tarily "freeze-framed," then moves on to work out the complexities of
his painting. Alone in his studio, he looks out past the picture plane,
indicating that it is only in the self that the drama of truth can occur.
And it is in the risks of the fifties-returning to a mode of realism from
which to resolve the contradictions between tonal value and flatness of
the canvas field, seeking more profound metaphors for humanist
issues-that we find the genesis of Helion's long, inexorable procession
toward his apotheosis,
The Last Judgment of Things,
painted when he
was seventy-five.
Helion's
Last Judgment
shares the organizing vision of the Renais–
sance world, in which knowledge is unified by metaphysical principles.
Just as in the Cinquecento, Helion thought of painting as inseparable
from other disciplines such as architecture, theater, mathematics, and
musIC.
In locating his work in art history, Helion finally seems able to recon–
cile inner and outer dimensions, private and public realms-as earlier on,
art and religion had channeled emotion. In his
Last Judgment,
he tran–
scends those tensions in a moment of order and equilibrium, the mean–
ing inextricably locked into the form. Only those who understand the
structure can fully decipher the meaning, like a Renaissance puzzle. Sit–
ting in Helion's chapel, surrounded on three sides by his painting, we
hear
the very song which emanates from his Venetian-inspired "col–
orito." In its present placement of three canvases on one wall,
Last Judg–
ment
is viewed all at once, in the space of a moment; but as placed on
three walls in the clockwise-wraparound sequence of the oratorio, it can
only be apprehended like a piece of music-through time. Thus Helion
keys his colors to the triadic harmonies of Renaissance music, a mathe–
matical scale of measured time. Indeed, his triptych is about the passage
of time-harkening back to the Paris flea markets of his youth, to his life
and work, and to his painterly heritage of over four hundred years.
Symbolically, Helion includes a small hourglass in the third canvas of
the triptych, a Christological allusion perhaps drawn from
The Marriage
at Cana.
In Veronese's work, it sits upon the musician's table but bears
no literal significance to the playing of music, as a metronome would;
instead, it relates to Christ's realization, "Mine hour is not yet come."
Thus Helion's
Last Judgment
is a simultaneous rendition of all scales, a
final
tour de force .
Yet for some the question may remain : Why construct
