Provocative and raising more questions than ever, Head Against the Wall is Johanna Helmuth’s solo exhibition at West Gallery, 48 West Avenue, Quezon City, until 10 May 2025. Featuring 10 oil paintings and a wood sculpture, it presents a transitional moment in coping with inner conflicts. How do you deal with it? Will it ever go away?
Consistently in her art practice, Helmuth uses herself, her family (a twin sister, brother, mother, relatives), and friends as the subject/object of her work. It remains her characteristic signature of a self in action. Her paintings evoke a strong autobiographical narrative intertwined with surrealistic imagination; trying to discern reality from fiction may be an exercise in futility.
Presenting the creative possibilities in exploring the realm of emotions, the artist paints them and unburdens the self. Going out of one’s comfort zone may be unsettling but it presents a greater challenge. When one feels too comfortable, it is time to leave. An exercise in catharsis, it offers the possibility of moving forward to that happy place.
Exhale (2025) depicts an intentionally inverted portrait of a young woman, throwing the viewer out of balance. Her mouth is open, reddish tongue out. A loud, loud scream reverberates in the stillness of the night. Below this portrait, a wooden sculpture of a female head rests on a table, eyes wide awake, blood coming out from one side of the mouth…..
Guarded Turmoil (2025): A moment of rest on the ground with a nail bat for protection, and a guardian angel hovering around. And yet, turmoil is still churning from the inside. In Transient Rest (2025): a pause when physical fatigue sets in but another kind of weariness remains, a melancholy kind of restlessness that never leaves.
Several paintings depict acts of self-harm and warning signs of danger (cutting off a limb, an arm burning over a stove, a vulture hovering) such as in So I Don’t Wander, Where the Wall Leans In, and Condemmed in the Sky. Visually disconcerting, one may think that they are only symbolic acts of helplessness and cries for attention. Viewers may squirm and feel uncomfortable, just the same.
So I Don’t Wander Off (2025) a young woman looks relieved with eyes closed, a big smile on her face looking upwards. With a long axe in hand, she has just cut off her right foot, bone jutting out but not a single trace of blood! Seriously? Problems are never solved in this manner, my dear.
In Where the Wall Leans In (2025) a woman, exhausted in the never-ending banality of house work, leans on a cooking range, with her right elbow on a lighted stove. Unflinching and numb, the face says it all.
In God Knows Where (2025), a young woman by the road side, carrying a blue backpack and wearing a printed blue bandanna, waits patiently to hitch a ride to somewhere, anywhere, just-get-me-out-of-here. The adventure with the self never ends. You must grab life and always remember, it is the journey that matters and never the destination.
Inner lives
Female figures remain central in Helmuth’s art practice; in portraying the inner lives of women, she draws strength from the lessons of those who came before her, the joys of their own experiences, but also their struggles. What surprised or scared them?
For Helmuth, the grotesque is never far away; skeletons have inhabited her works as well as acts of mutilation and disfigurement, even repugnant scenes. But repetition loses its charm, the “shock and awe” effect does not work anymore.
Mostly using subdued hues of blue and gray, Helmuth uses the palette knife instead of a paint brush, resulting in her distinctive and heavily textured work speckled with white or cream.
Johanna Helmuth (b. 1992): A graduate of fine arts major in advcrtising from the Technological University of the Philippines in 2014, she had her first solo exhibition titled Disfigure at ArtistSpace, Makati City in 2016. In 2018, she won the Fernando Zobel Prize for Visual Arts, Ateneo Art Awards. It was for her nominated exhibit titled Makeshift (Blanc Gallery) that included Makeshift Home, an installation of a metal pedicab decorated in plastic, wood, and fabric of silky taffetas and ruffles in pastel pinks and blues. It stems from her daily encounters with padyak drivers who transform their pedicabs into sleeping spaces or temporary houses. As part of her prize, she was the artist-in-residence at Artesan Gallery + Studio in Singapore.
While still in college, she and her friends started an art collective in 2012, called Studio 1616, with artist Lynryd Paras as their mentor, providing a safe place to explore and grow their artistic potential.
If you cannot draw or paint like Johanna Helmuth, what do you do when the doldrums hit you real bad?