Then We Will Fight in the Shade (of Clouds)

Nada Beroš

When, after a years-long painterly exhibition hiatus, Helena Schultheis Edgeler—painter and multimedia author, known in the art world primarily for her poetic experimental video films—decides to present her work to the public in the slow, anachronistic medium of painting, every alarm bell goes off!

Is the artist pointing to some genuine danger, or is this a form of rebellion, deception, or a play on what the Russian Formalists once called “defamiliarized expectation”? The question is apt, all the more so because this accomplished artist exhibits rarely, deliberately keeping her distance from the media noise and the public’s indifference disguised under a thin veil of curiosity. Clearly, she needs time for her ideas to ripen and to be realized in the way that, at that particular moment, seems the only possible one. She describes her creative process as a kind of diaristic practice, a daily note-taking of inner struggles, patiently awaiting what might eventually emerge from these records.

It is thus unsurprising that her last painting cycle, Tesseract, was presented to the public seven years ago, in 2014. Consisting of 12 works of the same format, each centered on a tesseract or hypercube in an imaginary fourth dimension, its complex compositions evoked the harmony and perfection of icons. Similarly to her symbolically titled experimental video Twelve—a meditation on the microcosm of human existence and the macrocosm of extrasensory reality, and a dedication to conceptual, film, and video artist Ivan Ladislav Galeta (1948–2013), her spiritual father and mentor—in Tesseract she pays homage to the historical avant-garde of a century ago, particularly the Russian avant-gardists and their “contemplation of reality in a wholly abstract and Suprematist manner.”

In her current painting cycle, entitled Put it in the Cloud, consisting of three monumental quadriptychs and a single modular painting, she turns—paradoxically, through the traditional medium of oil on canvas—towards the future. She projects possible future scenarios, interwoven without restraint with historical ones, replacing the raw force of warfare with artificial intelligence. In this two-dimensional flattening of space and time, she exposes all the (im)possibilities of the hybrid wars in which we live—except that we now call this era the digital revolution, rather than eclecticism.

Work on this cycle, presented at the Karas Gallery, began in 2017 and concluded in the summer of 2021. This lengthy creative process is significant for several reasons: it is evidence of years of conceptual reflection, but also of necessary pauses from artmaking, during which she devotes herself with equal intensity to her teaching position at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Textile Technology, as well as to work in nature, on a rural estate near Zagreb where she materializes, adopts, or discards her ideas. This is by no means a romantic retreat into nature, but rather arduous labor, with little room for idle contemplation. Yet, recalling Henri Focillon’s praise of the hand—which, long before the digital age, elevated the human hand to an instrument of thought—it is clear that her activities in the garden, forest, estate, or wooden manor have served as a catalyst, helping her arrive at solutions now visible in her new paintings.

For this artist, the proverbial “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”—that is, the easier path—does not apply. Rather, her approach aligns with Focillon’s workerly idea: the hand shapes the thought. The hand, our most vital tool in material reality, precedes the idea. As a trained painter, she could have chosen easier solutions, yet she opted for the laborious, often invisible work of the hand, seeking to prove, even to doubting Thomases, that an artist working with a computer not only remains an artist but can, in fact, be creatively superior to the machine. Whereas Joseph Beuys claimed that every person is an artist, Helena—infusing her work with a grain of humor and irony—shows that anyone can become an Old Master.

For from the most difficult situations, survival can come through courage, even cynicism. That is why, for the title of her latest painting, she uses the Spartan warrior’s line: In umbra, igitur, pugnabimus / Then we will fight in the shade—recalling the famous anecdote from the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE). According to the story, the Spartan soldier Dienekes, upon hearing the Persians’ threat that their arrows would blot out the sun, replied laconically: “All the better; then we will fight in the shade.” This sentence could well be considered the conclusion of Helena’s entire cycle.

Postmodern double-coding, present in nearly all her works, is in part the product of her dual degree in art history and fine art. Through her broad education and continual learning—engaged equally with culture and nature—she has gained the intellectual and human legitimacy to move freely between theory and practice, abstraction and narrative, story to story, and medium to medium, without fear that her heretical, eclectic engagement with painting might produce some Frankensteinian monster. Comic-strip framing and narration, cinematic dissolves, montage of attractions, and photographic sharpening of detail are among the characteristic methods found throughout the cycle, especially in its first and oldest foundational work, Nude Ascending (2017)

The very title of the painting refers to Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)—Duchamp (1887–1968) being arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century. Indeed, Duchamp’s painting became the “stem cell” from which Helena’s entire cycle derives. Every single detail of Put it in the Cloud—from the warrior’s helmet to the cherry blossom—is filtered through Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, in effect through a computer algorithm, from which the artist then selects and filters situations to create a new whole. Experimenting—in fact collaborating—with the computer, she not only chooses certain (limited) solutions offered by the program but creates them, compelling the machine to engage with her creativity.

Nude Ascending, of course, also alludes to ascension, to the rare possibility of touching celestial heights. The motif of rising from earth to sky—the motif of the Tower of Babel—is one of the central themes of this cycle. By invoking the icon of modern art, Marcel Duchamp, and simultaneously recalling the Ladder to Heaven by the Syrian Christian thinker St. John Climacus (St. John of the Ladder, late 6th–early 7th c.), she engages not only with the theme of ascent but also, candidly, with her own readiness for a free fall. Compressing three dimensions into two and using the double helix form as a carrier of information—with its deliberate reference to DNA—she symbolically charts her own artistic development and transformation through key moments in art history that shaped her.

The linear narrative of Nude Ascending, seamlessly unfolding across the four panels of this tetraptych, begins with an Egyptian motif of the solar barque—by which the souls of rulers traveled to the eternal afterlife, thanks to sun vessels that had gathered enough warmth to lift the soul heavenward. It continues with the Late Antique motif of the lily, then to the expulsion from Paradise—here movement takes place in the opposite direction—incorporating elements from Cranach and Raphael, before placing, midway, the female nude ascending the staircase. In addition to the already noted reference to Duchamp, the nude evokes Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), known for his use of multiple cameras to capture motion. Helena’s nude culminates in a dive into water—a motif taken from British Pop artist David Hockney, a modern art icon—and concludes with an allusion to Japanese painter Masami Teraoka, who, in her view, represents “maximalism,” a direction in which all prior art movements are interwoven. Alongside the sky, water is a crucial motif in Helena’s cycle, serving both as a screen and a mirror to the sky. The position and motif of a semi-nude Japanese woman holding a small camera to her eye accentuate the concluding diagonal and the compositional principle of the double helix. This movement, which began with a schematic depiction of solar collectors marking the moment consciousness entered the two-dimensional world, ends by exiting through the camera lens in the final quarter.

The artistic process here is an experiment—this was Helena’s first painting created using her new technological tool. The chosen digital style used details from Duchamp’s work, with all elements of her painting processed through a Duchamp sample. After extensive negotiations, modifications, corrections in graphic software, and filter applications, the artist selected a final solution. She then sketched traces onto the canvas and began the traditional process of oil painting. The method differs markedly from photorealism or hyperrealism: rather than mimesis, the key factors here are freedom of choice, combinatorics, and play.

While Nude Ascending is, in the artist’s view, a “female” painting symbolizing art, the second tetraptych, Babel / Global Player (2018–2021), addresses war—most often linked to male invention and achievement. The imagery and composition draw on Old Flemish masters, including Tobias Verhaecht, Marten van Valckenborch the Elder, Hendrik van Cleve III, among others. Using the Old Testament motif of the Tower of Babel, Flemish painters favored depicting the connection between earth and heaven, the longing for eternity, underpinned by the biblical tale of the confusion of tongues—human builders being punished by God for attempting, without His aid, to build their way to heaven.

Helena’s Babel comments on contemporary society’s confusion of tongues—a world which, through new technological possibilities and so-called augmented reality, nurtures illusions of its own omnipresence and omnipotence. The painting draws direct inspiration from the noise of social media and networks: chatter in which everyone speaks the same language of nonsense and lies, yet no one understands each other. Everyone feels the need to voice their own truth, but the more “truths” there are, the closer and dearer falsehood seems. Everything has disintegrated—deconstructed to the elementary particle of meaninglessness—until the question of whether humanity can return to its “factory” or “Creator’s” settings becomes irrelevant. Babel / Global Player also symbolizes the human drive for ceaseless social climbing, without the awareness or responsibility such action demands, hinting at a dystopian societal future. “The global player is each of us, just as every village on the planet can be a Babel. The human species strives for symbiosis with technology, and life without it seems unimaginable in the future. Yet, no matter how much technology has become our crutch, our consciousness has not developed in sync with the possibilities new technologies bring,” notes the artist.

The rift is evident, and it could lead to unforeseeable consequences. In our desire to shift into another dimension, another reality, we have neglected and destroyed nature and society, body and mind, individual and community. It is no surprise, then, that a threatening warrior looms above us, behind whom flutters a flag of unknown insignia. This warrior is depersonalized, face concealed, incomprehensible and unfathomable—a hybrid of samurai and Nazi soldier, a hero-coward who touches the contour of a transparent terrestrial globe, as though interacting with some futuristic interface. His intentions are unknown. No longer in need of weaponry, his touch is mightier than any arms.

The three Babel towers—symbols of the union of heaven and earth—here also touch the sky, or more precisely, the clouds. The latter appear in the title of the entire cycle, consciously borrowed from the “computer Esperanto” of English: Put it in the Cloud. In digital reality, we are invited to place our entire being into the Cloud, a virtual archive where all our data will be preserved for eternity. This very call—Put it in the Cloud—fuses the earthly principle of the tower’s upward reach with the heavens at the moment we enter another sphere, the sphere of promised eternity.

Is this our future? “Do you want your descendants to remember you through a digital cloud—for which some have already placed QR codes on tombstones instead of the old photographs of the deceased? In the Cloud instead of Heaven?”—as one popular international science program recently phrased the possible dilemma of modern humanity.

Helena Schultheis Edgeler deliberately leaves open the question of what this “other sphere” actually is, and what ascending to the heavens truly means. What kind of eternity is at stake—digital or metaphysical? Who are our deities today: technologies, wizards of Oz, nameless warriors? It is worth noting that both paintings were completed before the global COVID-19 pandemic, and that her focus is not on local struggles and politics. That is why there is no recognizable local context in these works, no hint of victims from this or that local war—for, as the artist claims, in the end we will all be victims.

Some socially engaged critics or artists might be tempted to liken her artistic stance to the proverbial “ivory tower,” as her distance from the “here and now” is defended through universalism. Yet the optics and scale she adopts should not be mistaken for a lack of engagement: she responds to the world’s challenges in a manner and language that are truthful and real to her—and deeply political.

It is in this context that the third painting of the cycle, the most personal one, can be read. Here, she poses the central question of the entire series: how does one control liminal states? This is a self-portrait engaging with the problem of artificial intelligence and the question of what such intelligence should do with us as inferior beings. Unlike the other three large-format works, this statement is less loud, and its dimensions match its quieter register as well as the physical space of the Karas Gallery. In fact, this site-specific work drifted in the clouds for a long time before the artist grounded it, seasoning it with the ironic title Homo ludens.

The associations with Fritz Lang’s cinematic classic Metropolis (1927) and its famous shot are hardly accidental for an artist well-versed in cinematic language, even within her painting practice. While in her films she explores the borders of the visible and invisible, in her painted self-portrait Homo ludens she again addresses liminal states—this time between wakefulness and sleep. For many years, as she has stated, she suffered from narcolepsy, a sleep disorder through which she learned to control and prolong these thresholds: “Sleep dominated my life, as I would fall asleep even while cycling. I had to sleep in order to recharge with life.” The title Homo ludens thus mocks our yearning for freedom, for in her view, the notion of a human freed from unnecessary physical labor through artificial intelligence—in order to gain more space for spirituality and PLAY—is utopian.

The result of collaborating with artificial intelligence, she believes, could be the DESERT. Indeed, the last painting of the cycle long bore the working title Desert. She ultimately opted for the Latin In umbra, igitur, pugnabimus / Then we will fight in the shade—as if wishing to leave the door ajar to hope, not only in the paintings of this cycle but for the world as a whole. Nature, here transformed into a nocturnal desert landscape where only the moonlight outlines the barren contours, is for most a place of fear, uncertainty, and death. Yet equally, the desert can be a place of trial and transformation. In the end, it may also be read as an image of calm, the cessation of constant chatter. Could silence be the solution for our planet, she wonders.

The environment she depicts in this final painting will hardly be friendly to the human species. The new title may be read to mean that survival will be reserved for the exceptionally brave—those who know how to fight even under impossible conditions, in the “shade” of the Spartan legend: IN UMBRA, IGITUR, PUGNABIMUS. For, however much human history has been marked by conflict, destruction, and violence, in art there undeniably remain traces of beauty and sublimity, as Helena notes. At this point, it is impossible not to recall Dostoevsky and his oft-quoted line from The Idiot: “Beauty will save the world.” Philosophers, theologians, writers, aestheticians, and theorists of various persuasions have been puzzling over its meaning for more than a century—prompted by different motives, yet with equal difficulty in grasping its full sense.

Will the (coming) world know how to recognize beauty?

How, indeed, can one recognize Duchamp’s long, slow exposure—a movement unfolding in a single frame—when, a century later, everything around us takes place at an incomprehensible speed and in an immeasurable flood of images? What, then, can be said of humanity’s longing for ascension, its constant need for transformation, which so often turns into nothing more than a technological extension and endless artificial upgrade? Languages have been confounded, directions inverted. Even the very concept of movement has been shaken. The static representation of movement so important to Duchamp, Helena now achieves through new means—by way of a computer algorithm.

By reversing the direction of motion in Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, the artist also ironizes her own position—her supposed “ascent” in the art world, a world in which advancement is measured solely by external metrics: the number of appearances at prestigious biennials, acquisition by museum collections, high auction prices, and participation in well-known art fairs. Nowhere is there mention of discovering a new language—let alone of beauty that might save the world.

Film scholar Ivan Paić, analyzing the audiovisual vocabulary and syntax of Helena Schultheis Edgeler within the corpus of contemporary Croatian video, asserts that there are very few artists like her, whose “expansion of boundaries, probing of the nature of the medium itself, and dismantling of established audiovisual barriers create new, additional possibilities in the specific aesthetics and dramaturgy of newly born experimental video.”

It may be concluded that a similar expansion of boundaries and probing of the nature of the painting medium is now taking place in her new cycle Put it in the Cloud. The new painterly language she has created in collaboration with the computer—taming it and persuading it to follow her, rather than a purely algorithmic nature—is the artist’s courageous and persistent ascent. It is an ascent toward that kind of cloud which might cast enough shade while the war among languages still rages, until the struggle between the visible and the invisible subsides, until the final silence falls.

Until beauty saves us.