ARTIST STATEMENT

HELENA RUBINSTEIN

I create in striving to universality, which does not categories and is free from definition of time and place.  Like finding a general language that is trying to embody feelings and situations of presence and belonging while searching for something - a place of the primary source - that is the place the artwork appears from.
In the painting we always see the moment after  - after the artwork was done.

There is a kind of a missing place, which is tugged at the soul, and expresses itself by the energy of disappearance. This energy takes me to the places of memory and longing  - takes me home to myself.

The images are drawn from memory and imagination and each of them is a kind of an organic material that carries the memory of a particular place, instinctively  (as love and loss, doubt and faith, hopefulness and despair). These images are fragile and tender, free of boundaries of time and space, although they are still a product of a particular place and motion.  It seems like reaching, but actually there is only a continuity of forming.

By the conversation that I have with the viewer, I want to lead him into a place without always revealing the destination, a place deeper than local geography.

I work intuitively and instinctively, I experience painting like a dancer experience a dance – I feel it in my body. I take the space on the canvas going with it to see where it leads. Mystery and nostalgia meet in the space of the canvas, sometimes it leads me to a place that I like, a place I haven’t been in before. I surrender to uncertainty, like flying away.