For nearly three decades and with fearless commitment, Bonita Helmer has engaged in a kind of existential / theosophical abstract painting which ranges over a wide variety of not easy themes. According to the artist, her large gestural fields of galaxy like roiling spheres hope to invoke both spiritual and practical human questions -- the expanse of consciousness, the range of deep space, our relationship to the cosmos, our planet and by extension to each other.

A student of meditation, Buddhism, Kabbalistic mysticism, and new physics, Helmer is equally comfortable with close friends like Francoise Gilot, the late Jonas Salk as well as Cal Tech scientists and avid collectors who design the computer systems that send objects to faraway stars. In fact it is the images sent back to earth by Hubble that inspire both Helmer’s art and personal meditations on our place in some cosmic scheme of things.

Over three decades that have included grad studies at Otis College of Art, a serious mentorship with Françoise Gilot, and those fits and stops that mark a life fully lived (marrying, mothering, healing from a life-threatening illness, global travel), Helmer has managed to garner a reputation as a respected teacher and an internationally collected painter. Her work was recently included in the "L.A. Story" show with Ruth Weisberg and Tony Berlant at the Hebrew Union College Museum at NYU.

With dense, encrusted surfaces that are in turn painterly and sculptural, with fields of sonorous color that look both vaporous and calcareous, Helmer’s work refuses in many ways to reify Western European oppositional and “either or” constructs like finite and infinite, inner and outer, art and science.

As I have said elsewhere, it takes a unique sort of courage to step so tenaciously into this kind of style and content, with its undeniable association with a declining Pollock sloshing paint about, or worse, the framed up corporate fodder in squiggly colors merchandized by art consultants. Well versed in art history and its discourses, Helmer knows all this. She spends a minimum of six hours a day in the studio and as gestural abstraction has come in and out of favor, Helmer has pressed on, refining her work. This is not therefore a fad; it is a formal and existential study. This artist uses media as a personal vehicle to ask about the nature of existence and experience----big utopian questions a postmodern world may have correctly decided are no longer answerable.

To speak with the artist you come to see that she believes staunchly that art can still engage in this kind of collective meaning-making, that art can still offer us a way to comprehend who and what we are, to take the fracture of post modern experience and find something unified and unitary in it. Helmer's work has been a career long effort to remind us that categorical oppositions are to a great extent artifactual. In her micro and macro visual references to phenomena infinitely larger than us (deep space, the birth of stars) and intimately linked to us / our bodies (cells, vascular systems, air and light), Helmer uses abstract form as a kind of a ritual action and ritual space where she (and we if we are so inclined) investigate the unity of human consciousness and the human condition.

This runs contrary to our cultural evolutionary arc. The legacy and habit of Western European art and culture, as both have become increasingly specialized and industrial, has been to engage in and construct tidy categories of distinction: “high” art vs. quotidian life, creativity vs. science, and body vs. mind. We sequester practical life from spiritual life, theory from practice, art for pleasure from art for social purpose; we make strict rationalist divisions between the observed physical world of empirical facts and that “other place” where we pose those broader timeless metaphysical queries.

Until fairly recently, the job of art was tied to ritual and ritual acts and objects were inquiries about the grander scheme of things, collective dialogues about creation, destruction used by cultures over the millennia to make meaning and sense of why we are here; to connect the real with the abstract, the tangible and magical, the highly personal with the urgently collective. Until very recently in human history, art and image making were intimately tied to ritual activities whose very function it was to enact, to wonder about and reinforce the unity between the apparent dichotomies of human experience.

Helmer uses form as an analogue for these “ritualistic” existential questions and resolutions. Works like “Strings Attached” are intended by her to communicate the contractions and expansions, transpositions of energy which both science and spiritualism tell us are at the basis of the universe and our understanding of it. Theosophic, mystical, tantric conceptions of "unity” are referenced via materials and form. For example, her surfaces look rocky and meteoric and ephemeral at once; the sense of space she creates is both palpable like the air in a fog, and immaterial. Helmer's fields look like they at the same moment contracting and expanding; your vision is localized at a circular mass of color but also spreads to the edges in all directions.

In several interviews with this writer, Helmer had made it clear that art for her is neither spiritual nor political preaching. However the artist acknowledges that because her work hopes to invoke the whole of experience, such themes cannot help but come up. Soothing and apocalyptic, her images manage to somehow remind us that even space is aclutter with gizmos and signs of humanity’s incessant will to power. Often you will see a hard edge floating in these frothy fields; it is quite literally the edge of the Hubble camera lens and an analogue for the fact that technology’s power makes the mysteries of far and inner space knowable. What the artist adds in discussing her concerns is that without some spiritual compass we take our petty passions and waste wherever we go forth. She packs all this into her art,

Helmer notes that ironically enough, at its most sophisticated, science startsto look like a first cousin to ancient Eastern and Mid Eastern mystical traditions. Einstein’s imaginings of deep space equated energy, matter and light into one system; more recently, particle physics looked deep inside the smallest matter to find that in and through it there is anti matter--its doppelganger or mirror entity lacking dimension, space, or charge but no less “present” String Theory and cosmic consciousness start looking like neighbors and these complexities fascinate and inspire Helmer.

Like all abstraction undertaken at the artist’s risk, this work looks easy. It is not. Using eccentric pigments and processes that are in turn tightly controlled and allowed to happen by chance, Helmer mixes water based acrylics and aerosol enamels. She lays down pigments and gloss media strategically, methodically, then lets these opposing oil based, water based materials cure and crack in natural aberrant heat so that the there is an element of both fixedness and order, as well as unpredictable dispersion — the first and second laws of thermodynamics encapsulated visually,
Conveyed emotionally by a more than deft mark maker.

One closes then by noting that Helmer’s facility can also be her liability. She is a studied and instinctive mark-maker and colorist; so eye pleasing is this work that it can become decorative when not checked. A vigilant and very honest artist, Helmer is sufficiently self-aware to challenge her own habits; the newest work shows the artist skillfully reigning in dazzle, going for and accomplishing the compositional and chromatic subtlety demanded by serious abstract work dealing with such big ideas.

Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue (2007)
Associate Professor of Art History and Contemporary Art
Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Otis College of Art and Design
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(translated from French)

….From your California, fresh out of their crates, leaning against the walls of this “Sacre Bateau-Lavoir”, your paintings emerge, one after the other and I look at them like some savage icons.

….Nothing informal in this debris of shattered windows, of destroyed woodwork of forsaken ironwork, but the wrecks, the marks of your streets brought back to life through the act of painting. These marks transform themselves, then becoming celebration, even ceremony. With bits and pieces of stranded houses, you reconstruct the houses from inside.. with broken mirrors you recreate the sky to give them light.. .blue. gold and red cadmiums so deep they make earth, sky and clear waves for the fish they want to confine..

I love that you use your angst and the agony for the earth and the sky marred by so much human debris to make a true work of art, a religious work, humble and proud. You do not use these found objects, you give them meaning.

Finally, finally beautiful feelings generate beautiful art. Welcome and thank you for being who you are, Bonita, and have a great spring in Paris… To you……”Artist of Los Angeles”

Luc Simon, Painter (1996)
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The great Renaissance artists introduced four centuries of paintings which celebrated human and natural forms. Portrait, still life and landscape imagery dominated European art until the advent of Modernism in the late19th century Impressionism, Post- impressionism and Expressionism still referenced these themes but were more about the nature of art then they were about nature.

By the mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionism was poetically addressing feelings and the nature of painting. "Art for Art’s Sake" or art about art was inherently apart from the traditional, more-inclusive Renaissance ideals, and the art world became more insular and removed from the rest of the world as a result.

While an art historical education is not prerequisite to enjoying contemporary art, the viewer can perhaps gain a deeper appreciation of a given work by understanding the references and traditions it contains. For example, if one knows that Pop Art confronted Abstract Expressionism with bold cartoon-like images from daily life, one can see specific references to both movements in Bonita Helmer’s paintings.

Like earlier Pop artists, Ms. Helmer uses found objects against painted surfaces. In referencing the glass, screens, wire and paper Helmer combines painted abstract and realistic surfaces. Luc Simon, Parisian artist and critic, wrote in 1996 that she brought cast- off objects "back to life through the art of painting."

While her work acknowledges Abstraction, Realism, Dadaism, Minimalism and other modern movements, it is not bound to any of them. Instead Ms. Helmer achieves a rich and cohesive series of informed contemporary images about life today and the art history of the past 150 years.

Helmer’s work has a feeling of visual poetry; it is both literal and allusive, objective and subjective; specific and abstract. In 1991, Nancy Doll, then curator of 20th Century Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, wrote that Helmer’s work was, "a coexistence of dualities that encourage reflection."

The variety of comment and interest Ms. Helmer’s work inspires is drawn from her rich art historical vocabulary. Her ability to synthesize the insights of past artists into contemporary modes of expression which talk about life today is intriguing and inspirational. The viewer is challenged to work harder to uncover all of the poetic and historical references but is richer for the experience.

Patrick H. Ela, (1998)
Curator Transamerica Exhibition Program
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The idea of beauty has suffered a bad rap in the art in recent years, along with such notions as emotional content and spirituality. Bonita Helmer shies away from none of these, however, in either her thought or her art. At the heart of Helmer’s paintings lies the wish to render visible some of the complex richness of life, particularly in the conjunction of opposites. Hers is not a blending or homogenization of elements into a third form, but a coexistence of dualities that encourage reflection. This series of paintings – “sanctuaries” as she calls them – are not simply havens of complacent security, conceptually or visually. Rather, they pose a very real concern about the contemporary threats to those remaining enclaves of spiritual and emotional nourishment. In painterly terms, Helmer employs unconventional materials and methods that test the conventions of her medium and incorporates visually appealing elements into paintings that bear a tough message.

Bonita Helmer's art is grounded in process. Her material procedure is a lengthy one of building up a final surface from the intermixing and overlaying of medium, iridescent pigments, glass and other materials into the substance of acrylic paint. Moreover, each painting evolves out of the previous one, as well as from a wealth of sketches and dream images. And, finally, her art is a revelatory act – an effort to visually express some of life’s ineffable paradoxes.

Nancy Doll (1992)
Curator of 20th Century Art Santa Barbara Museum of Art
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