Emily Helstroffer

Emily Helstroffer, reveals the hidden meaning.

Emily Helstroffer asserts the image-making power of portraiture by questioning female identity through singular portraits.

Drawn to the expression of each character she paints, Emily works without a model and uses her imagination. She magnifies the portrait by sublimating what is hidden from our eyes; a look, a detail of the face, the body. So many presences and signs that fade away and that we must decipher before they disappear. The artist wishes to privilege the emotion to the exact restitution of the figure and its identity. She thus reinforces the chosen duality between figuration and abstraction.

She uses acrylic, oil or Indian ink, sometimes recycled materials, such as wood, leaves, cardboard, paper, sand etc.. She also juxtaposes the tones. It is moreover in this relation to the color that is also the originality of its practice.

The palette mixes the lightness of the flesh with the radiant flat tints used for the background, thus contributing to a moving impression, a dynamic sensation that contributes to the deconstruction of the composition. The controlled and mannered line is undoubtedly part of the modern filiation.

The painter decenters the question of the reference point, she does not allude to any unity of time or place. The characters, emptied of their space and context, are recharged by their own potential for occupation. Emily is particularly fond of portraits of women. A female model inexhaustible in the beauty, the sensuality of the gestures and the attitudes which it releases. 

"We live in a very hectic and wild society where violence against women is almost daily. My work is a cry for help against violence against women."

A dramatic tension slips into the detail, allowing the anecdotal to become meaningful. In these latest series, the artist paints women with bare breasts where the nipples are revealed as clues, at the edge of intimacy, allowing him to testify, in his own way, to his experience of the fight against breast cancer.

 "I consider the breasts as a source of life, women feed their children with their breasts. On the other hand, when the breasts are diseased and surgically mutilated, it is a real loss of self-identity."

The apparent tranquility of the subjects actually hides a discreet dramatic tension where the signs of a moment of anxiety, of loneliness pierce. This troubling impression generates the sensation of contradictory thoughts. Between light and shadow, death and life, Emily Helstroffer's painting is a dreamlike painting where the hidden meaning is revealed under an existential component. Canoline Critiks.