The weight of green (and other wavelengths)

For twenty years, Wieteke Heldens (b. 1982, Ottersum) has approached painting as the solving of problems she sets for herself. For the artist, each work begins not with an image but with a rule: a dimension, a number, a formula that carries personal or universal meaning. From that rule, she works her way towards a solution, a painting that seeks order in a world that does not always allow itself to be ordered.

Although her work has changed considerably over the past twenty years, this starting point has remained constant. Each time, she begins again, stops, and picks up once more, in search of an almost healing form of contemplation. Chance and sensibility play the role that order and system seem to promise, giving a seemingly chaotic reality a structure that feels both ordered and organic.

This search is closely bound up with her life. Heldens lives with lupus and survived anorexia, experiences that taught her to see beauty in imperfection and strength in fragility. When she lay in intensive care, with doctors uncertain whether she would survive the night, she began counting the colours in the room, without shape or form. Back in her studio, she counted her materials in the same way, a means of turning reality into a new narrative. From this, the series Legends emerged.

The title of each work, too, is part of this near-mathematical process: it often refers to the physical weight of the painting, sometimes carrying a double meaning, a final step that grounds the work and completes the task. In The weight of green (and other wavelengths), these threads come together: colour as something that can be counted, and weight as the quiet, material affirmation of what has been endured.