Catalogue Essay for Return to Disintegration Periodical Review 11
10/12/21 – 22/01/22
Pallas Projects, Dublin
I have been drawn to Helen Blake’s paintings for many years now, and have followed her work in various group exhibitions and in her previous solo shows. Her 2021 solo exhibition Recent Work at The Molesworth Gallery has taken her work to a new level where it hums and chimes with a resonant sense of ‘suchness’, of things being just right exactly as they are. The work, optical in nature, for me achieved a synaesthetic effect where I was impressed by the work’s musicality, melodious and minimal, layered with surfaces and depth, rhythm and repetition. There is also a sense of space and activity in the work that suggests that what we are seeing is a marquee view of a vast complex of planes and interacting forms where pattern has depth and width beyond the surface of its presentation.
Mark Cullen
Director/Curator Pallas Projects, Dublin.
10/12/21 – 22/01/22
Pallas Projects, Dublin
I have been drawn to Helen Blake’s paintings for many years now, and have followed her work in various group exhibitions and in her previous solo shows. Her 2021 solo exhibition Recent Work at The Molesworth Gallery has taken her work to a new level where it hums and chimes with a resonant sense of ‘suchness’, of things being just right exactly as they are. The work, optical in nature, for me achieved a synaesthetic effect where I was impressed by the work’s musicality, melodious and minimal, layered with surfaces and depth, rhythm and repetition. There is also a sense of space and activity in the work that suggests that what we are seeing is a marquee view of a vast complex of planes and interacting forms where pattern has depth and width beyond the surface of its presentation.
Mark Cullen
Director/Curator Pallas Projects, Dublin.