The Sunday Times, June 12 2005

Dipped into Chinese Aesthetics
Art Criticism by Emmanuel Fiorentino

Those who over the past few weeks took even the briefest of looks at the exhibition of 24 gouache, watercolour and ink paintings, done over the past two years by Helga Portanier at the Contemporary Room of the Museum of Fine Arts, must have been quite exalted by the unusual manner of this young artist’s pictorial vision.

This is the first solo exhibition for this young artist’s talents, but in no way does it expose her to anything of the immature sort. What stands out especially is, and here I quote from a note accompanying the hanging works, her adaptability towards giving a line or a brush mark the essentials of ‘above all an action revealing the movements of the artist’s hand and mind at the moment of their creation’.

Thus as she explained to me in the course of a casual meeting at the exhibition venue, the movement is reflected as being for example like a lento or a furioso movement in music. All this must have been wheedled into her mind in the course of her tutorship with Mro Grech, who made a name for himself both in the musical and visual artistic fields. The long-standing passionate appeal by the latter for fossilised forms has added that extra factor in Portanier’s exploration of adaptable material for her visual imagery.

Though anything that is recognisable in these works more or less belongs to the Maltese context, the end result is quite far removed from the traditional ‘westernised’ way of representing it. Here of course comes into play Helga Portanier’s in-depth studies of Oriental especially Chinese painting, and in particular that genre where the contents seem consumed within vast distances, and where the minimalist quotient seems to render them as ideal objects for deep meditation. I have in mind in particular the two examples respectively showing a triad of steel windmills and electrical pylons traversing an otherwise featureless countryside that seems lost in a hazy atmosphere. The effect, rather pallid in physical strength, becomes fortified by the reflective spirit.

Two other works in particular, quite abstract in effect, which are entitled Primordial Land I and II typify the artist’s direct inspiration from natural forms and their aged expanses and unexpected conformations. The attention to textured details goes a long way towards defining her beneficial resources.

Obviously it is too early to prognosticate whether the artist would maintain her close linkages with what appears to be tethered to Chinese iconographic aesthetics. I for one tend to fully believe or rather hope that somehow or other there is enough scope for her to continue on these lines. In that case that would stimulate her to deepen further this rapport with a distant exotic culture.

Having said all that, I am positively convinced that Portanier will flourish in the artistic fields in years to come. This initial display in Valletta will in future come to be regarded in retrospect as the seminal source for any further output of her undoubted talents. One looks forward to that.