Helen Tóth: The dusk belongs to us

Mgr. art. Helen Tóth, 1992, lives in Dunajská Streda and works in Bratislava in Nová Cvernovka. In 2007-2011 she studied at the Josef Vydra School of Applied Arts in Bratislava and later, in 2012-2016, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studio of prof. Ivan Csudai and in 2016-2018 in the studio of prof. Daniel Fischer. She is a three-time finalist for the VÚB Bank Prize for Painting (2017, 2022 and 2023) and in 2022 she was nominated for the Piero D ́Amore E Colore Prize at The Others Art Fair in Turin, Italy. In 2022 she was nominated for the Strabag Artaward International Prize in Vienna. On the basis of the jury’s selection, she participated in the Zlín Youth Salon 2024. Her greatest success was her participation in the collective exhibition Belvedere na Hluboké – Let it Grow again! at the Alšův jihočeský gallery, which was co-organized by the Austrian Belveder. The exhibition included artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Rona Pondick, Honoré Daumier, Edmund Gwerk, Liza Lou, Krištof Kintera and others.

There is a certain collective idea of the forest. Everyone thinks of the same things as a forest: trees, mountains, fresh air. But the actual being of a forest is quite independent of the way we understand what a forest is. Everyone interprets it in their own way, Helen explores forests from a visual point of view, observing their otherness, visual difference, perceiving shapes, colours, scents, textures, contrasts, compositions and atmospheres. She focuses on the dialogue between the different branches, which suddenly enter into a state of fusion, they may seem to be strangers to each other – each of them just came from a different corner, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t live together in a harmonious symbiosis. It carries a symbolic message: the act of relocating a specific element to a different environment, where it coexists seamlessly with the new, with the other. In the works, it replaces the gaze of man with the gaze of a tree – now it is the tree that takes care of the valley and becomes the guardian of the hill. That is why he depicts them similarly to the way people are depicted. The portraitist tries to penetrate the essence of the individual, and Helen equally tries to understand the trees. To become trees, to be thousands of trees at once, breathing through the thin, densely interwoven fibers of the understory, and to experience, to gain the experience of the forest. The selfish desire to reincarnate into nature with the possibility of retaining a human mind. To know, see and feel the happenings that elude us humans, that we cannot experience with our senses, that remain forever hidden from us. We can only imagine it. But imaginations are inaccurate. The human presence is completely excluded from the paintings, so that at least one place in the world remains out of human reach. The night belongs to the trees and the animals – it’s quite a comforting thought. There is no roaring or shooting at night. His work pays tribute to trees and plants that grow in spite of the harsh environment, the unpredictability of the weather, and harmful human activity, but still manage to make their way to the surface.