Just behind the CD stacks, a few hundred or so dolls, rubber superheroes, manga characters, dismembered Kewpies, blackface salt and pepper shakers recline on a shelf. "These are some of the models for the paintings," Helnwein says. "What I'm really interested in is the artificiality. The strange reality -- like you have in these video games and animated movies."
He may splice the dolls together with scenes of everyday reality -- an image drawn from his loop of thoughts. "The pieces are narrative," he says, "like one frozen second of a story. There is always something after it and always something before it. That's what I pass on to my viewers, 'the onlookers.' "
Much of his aesthetic inspiration, he explains, comes from America -- film, rock 'n' roll, comics. "Because when I was a kid, I was living in this limbo. My parents seemed strange to me. There was this strange silence." Somewhere in that blank, dark space, landed an American comic book -- the adventures of Donald Duck.
"It was like stepping into this miraculous universe. . . . There were no limits. You could be pierced with a bullet and walk again. I felt right away at home," he says. "America was winning throughout the world so kids [here] wanted to identify with heroes. And Donald Duck is the opposite. In Europe, where everything was destroyed -- Donald Duck the loser, fitted much more. I love this duck. It is amazing he made it at all."
What occupies most of the wall space, like a still to-be-mined thought, is a sampling of the past, older paintings, each a starkly different point on a map of his evolution: A noir-esque series based on "these images of my childhood, like black and white movies." A monochromatic diptych dedicated to writer Antonin Artaud. "He was one of the great, amazing artists. Completely failed of course. He was too radical," Helnwein says. And grouped on a far wall, a photo montage, "48 Poems," images distorted to the point that they mimic the effect of peering through steam or clouds.
"It's people who died a violent death," he explains. "I collected the photographs from different morgues in Europe . . . photographed them again, and then again until it started to get blurred. Each face is connected to a real story, a tragedy.
"When you come closer, the less you see. But if you go away the more you see. Close up, it's just an abstract nothing. Almost nothing. It's connected to a real human being's story, but at the same time it's fading away like an old memory."
He steps closer, then steps away; repeats the motion once more: "You have to force people not to forget. This is why Goya painted all of those cruel themes. Not because he was a sadist but because he knew we'd forget. That's the mechanism I don't understand. There needs to be somebody who holds it in your face. All the time."
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lynell.george@latimes.com
