Johanna Helmuth’s paintings draw their dreamlike strength from her community and its environs.

Written by Sean Carballo
October 3, 2023

Conceived in northern Italy around the late 14th century, tarot cards originally served as everyday playing cards, each one representing a figure with some connotative, ornate meaning. The oldest surviving tarot deck, the Visconti-Sforza deck, has been said to be inspired by costumed characters associated with the carnival. The Hanged Man, one of the cards from this deck, depicts an image of a man suspended upside-down. A common punishment for traitors in Italy, the act of hanging was a shameful and humiliating sentence, reserved only for the most dreadful sins. However, its representation in the Visconti-Sforza inverted this script: the Hanged Man appears as a monkish presence, staring serenely ahead, suggesting a deed of self-sacrifice far removed from the punishment’s traditional links with criminality. He is inside the moment, at peace.

Over the years, the Hanged Man has come to signify contemplation in the face of total renunciation. A patience withstanding uncertainty and pain. When the artist Johanna Helmuth had her tarot read in the United States earlier this year, the Hanged Man was the first card that showed up. “It is the card that suggests ultimate surrender, sacrifice, being suspended in time,” she recalled in our interview. The artist, whose works, too, have that immersive quality of suspension, had then been working on a series of works populated with such characters, people confronting strange places and circumstances, armed with the knowledge of some kind of stoic mysticism.

Helmuth’s ongoing Artinformal Makati show, titled Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, features her version of the Hanged Man in “Complete Surrender”: a woman, with skin textured like tree bark, wears an olive green top and lavender underwear and, as she is suspended upside-down on a wooden beam, looks at us in a state of complete stillness. “It’s a reminder to myself to let go of control,” she said. Seeing her works on display in this latest exhibition, it’s not hard to imagine how the Hanged Man became a grounding talisman for Helmuth, and how, accordingly, the relinquishment of control has opened up new vistas for her art practice.

“These works involve a lot of my adventures through California and Arizona,” Helmuth says of her paintings. “But they end up back home in the Philippines.” Employing a brush to outline and palette knife to fill in colors, Helmuth’s paintings forgo realism in favor of peripatetic wandering. Travel becomes a path to relive color, image, and texture, where moments of roaming are illuminated in their quiet beauty. A joyous moment around a campfire is etched with glints of yellow and purple all around. Two dogs come up to a woman, one with a wooden spoon in his mouth, and the other with mushrooms. These scenes appropriate a distinctly Californian gothic: a woman converses with a skeleton at the back of her pick-up truck. Warming his hands over a fire, a man watches as a bony hand reaches out from inside the trash bin. The exultant title of the exhibition, which cheekily alludes to Helmuth’s awe at the heavens, mimics her paintings’ sly wit.

“My paintings are surreal, perhaps because I want to give emphasis to my feelings,” Helmuth says. “Feelings I want to recreate or eternalize on the canvas.” And so, happiness looks like a woman flying with enormous angel wings. Love and friendship look like two friends performing a miracle of light. Titled “Light-Bearers,” the painting was inspired by a hard time she faced with her friend Paula while she was in Los Angeles. “We did everything we could to help each other again, and this birthed the painting ‘Light-Bearers’ because we ignited each other’s light.”

“It all depends organically,” Helmuth tells me. “On how I felt at that time. That’s why I have to be ready to note it down when it hits so when I’m in my studio I can execute.”

Helmuth’s paintings draw their dreamlike strength from her community and its environs. The characters of these works thaw under the warmth of care and togetherness. In a painting titled “Solely You and I,” a woman in cowboy boots sits next to a baby horse, his tongue sticking out in a playful pose. Elsewhere, in “Solid Ground,” another woman sits cross-legged amid a field of cacti, rocks, and Joshua trees. She looks right at home in this atmosphere.

It comes as no surprise that Helmuth’s journey to art likewise depended so much on community. As part of the art collective Studio 1616, founded by Lynyrd Paras, Helmuth participated in group shows early in her career. After class, she would go to art galleries or to her friends’ studios; this soon became a routine throughout her college years. “We were all painting and each discovering our own kind of art practice,” she recalled. “I just tried and tried because I had nothing. I basically had nothing to lose.” Studio 1616 provided Helmuth a safe space to experiment, learn, and challenge herself. “Kuya Lynyrd Paras gave us complete freedom to paint and gather in his studio so we were all able to grow together.”

Eventually, she used the money she saved from those group exhibitions to rent a small space in Biñan, Laguna. “I had no internet, no TV, and a rough phone service. There were no distractions. I only had the basic art materials.” From that bare-bones space, she worked on her first solo exhibition.

With Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, she has expanded her practice to incorporate materials beyond oil and canvas. In the sculpture “Free As Can Be,” a life-sized woman squats and stares out into the distance ahead of her, completely unbothered. “The woman is taking a shit without giving a shit,” she says, describing the work. “I feel the freest and most vulnerable when I’m with nature. I’m out there minding my own business.” Just like her Hanged Man sculpture, the sculpture feels like a natural extension of her practice, blending the profane and sacred, the real and unreal, with both grace and wit.