Ms. Bonita Helmer at George Billis Los Angeles provides an eruptive opening with a thoroughly appropriate reflectance on the Natural Path, ordered from the beginning of the creation of light. Our preconception of light and its intensity may deter us from understanding that most of what we know to be the motion of what permeates all motion in the cosmos is invisible to the human eye. It is here where Ms. Helmer as artist is able to reveal to us its propagation through an admixture of the unformed to the permanently formed.

It is no surprise that Ms. Helmer has a passionate devotion to the human understanding of the natural world, progressed so far over the last few centuries that she can play with our concept with such a positive affirmation of its motion. Indeed, this is the correct perspective when we think about Nature: it is the order of all things which is necessarily perceivable through the human senses. And it is in motion. To where though? To some blind convergence of destruction? Impossible. And Ms. Helmer rightfully depicts this motion to its actual end of eternal truth.

Bonita Helmer, Change in Velocity (GB1), 2020, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and George Billis LA.

From amoebic projectile foaminess to the inconceivable permanence of the triangle, a concept self-contained only in the self-reflectance of a mind acting upon itself rather than through the body, her aims at depicting the cosmos as condensing to the eternal representation of sentience are sound, instead of the ersatz haphazard star pollution of an unexplainable origin self-contained in orders of invisible material meaninglessness. Change in Velocity (GB1) gives us this sensation of progress from cosmic ether to the pyramid, an ancient conception from the mind of “Divine” Kings seeking to mold the light of creation into a demonstration of their gradient in self-moving power; all as a method to impress in their ability to generate a conscious object other minds cannot possibly cause into being. To represent the subject matter as cosmic in toto, that human minds themselves are extensions of cosmic concatenation to reveal a necessary world permanently beyond our senses into the actual, is sublimely painted with laconic fortitude in the objects themselves. This reveals to us a more pensive meditation on what amounts to, not just in this work but throughout the entire show, a more proper understanding of the Big Bang.

Bonita Helmer, As Time Goes By II, 2021, Acrylic and Spray Paint on canvas, 20 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and George Billis LA.

As Time Goes By II is another work which is appropriately Aristotelian in its celebration of the universe’s progression. That we have such a concrete objectification of the harmony in nature, extending to a form which exists independent of human minds but nevertheless exists in the Eternal Mind, reveals to us further the excitation of this motion towards a brighter future world to come. The gradient in color choices representing the ordering in the composition from cold to warm, from lacking an ardency to progressing towards the firmament of the triangle – a supraphenomenal conscious object which celebrates man’s ability to know that the eternal reality is one of necessary self-reliant agreement – provides us with a further testimony to the quality of the substrate to which our minds operate upon as immaculate.

Since we ought to judge what is perfect to be what is necessarily harmoniously activating greater experiences of beauty, The Natural Universe, as depicted by Ms. Helmer, is accordingly good.