International Affairs

“My paintings must not be experienced through the mind, but through the senses”

This is how the Icelandic artist Helga Benediktsdóttir describes her paintings: clarified and well-considered color mixtures, shapes and lines. For many years, the theme of Growth has been the focal point of her works. A single green sprout shoots from a pot and lights up in front of a muted background in a darker, monochrome green. Soon the pot has one, soon several openings; in one picture the sprout stands as a single, delicate shoot, and in the next to fill the whole surface as an ornament. For several years she has pursued the simple motif in again new variations. The green is not randomly selected. Colors are important to Helga Benediktsdóttir, green is the central color in the Growth pictures. Green is in the middle between sky blue and hell red, and therefore it radiates calm, expectation and humanity. Green is the color of hope and therefore also the color of paradise. 

Beauty and aesthetics are important to Helga Benediktsdóttir, and therefore it is easy to choose a purely aesthetic approach to the images and think them into perfectly staged living rooms – You can be satisfied with beautiful wholes, without looking for anything under the aestheticizing surface. But here you go wrong with the pictures. For Helga Benediktsdóttir’s pictures are icons. Perhaps not in the strict Christian sense nor tied up in a liturgy. Yet they have in common with the Christian image of devotion that they are centered around a simple, easy-to-read motif that refers to something immaterial and spiritual beyond the tangible reality. An icon has to be both naturalistic and stylized, for the central figure of the saint and the display of certain symbolic objects. Creates a bridge between the physical reality of the beholder and the spiritual world in the abstract sky of luminous gold leaf behind the figure. In the same way, Helga Benediktsdóttir leads simple everyday motifs – a pot with a sprout – into the green background, where a spiritual experience fume opens up for the viewer.