Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Opening, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Helen Johnson. Featuring ten paintings on canvas that were produced while Johnson undertook training as an art therapist, Opening can be understood as a form of self-portrait of the Melbourne-based artist. Inspired by Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, the works on display together produce distinct affective registers for intimate explorations of love, loss, subjecthood and belonging.
During her years in therapeutic training, the artist’s painting practice has reoriented toward psychoanalytical conceptions of the human body. The corporeal body remains a focus alongside these developments, both in scale – which is determined by the artist’s physical reach – and in the approach to figuration. In several works, Johnson assembles various body parts into whole figures like a game of exquisite corpse; elsewhere, atomised fragments coalesce into unfamiliar forms. In Late mirror stage, one of the large canvases on display, two pictorial levels meet in a way previously unseen in the artist’s paintings. Inspired by Lacan’s paper on The Mirror Stage (1949), where a jubilant infant first conceptualises himself as a person in the world, independent of his mother, the work centres on the moment where a swirling ribbon passes between the pinched fingers of a figure belonging to a different register within the composition. The artist considers Late mirror stage to share similarities with her practice as an artist and art therapist; both necessitate shifting between the positions of observer and creator, of producing a mirror image of oneself in order to hold space for others.