Helen Verhoeven’s paintings are strange pictures, her characters a little sinister and ghoulish as if living in an underworld of shadows, a place in which art history is subverted, mutated, her groups and portraits an expressive riff on Goya, Picasso and the more mannered paintings of the 18th and 19th Century
There is alot going on in this darkness, Verhoeven has alot of fun at arts expense, her aesthetic drawn from folk art and German Expressionism while her subject matter a biting satire on stately portraiture. However, unlike her historical references, Verhoeven does not wish to portray her characters subtly rather she depicts them in a vaguely sexual way, they are uneasy, furtive, there is a tension and latent violence underpinning each picture.
What’s most striking about these paintings is the narrative. For whilst vulgarity and emotional intensity are omnipresent in each picture, there is also a nobility, a sense that Verhoeven is portraying strong women in charge of their own destiny. When men are present they are impotent, tokenistic, irrelevant, while the women play out the age old struggles of sex and power, rich and poor, famous and unknown, noble and plebeian. It is a toxic combination that drives the narrative, has us exploring the paintings for nuances, seeking more information, wanting to know more about the people that are staring vacantly from the canvas.