Drift: the vision of Hélène Goulet

Claude Gauthier
Sep 27
6 min read

Hélène Goulet's work, titled "Dérive," presented here, straddles the divide between abstraction and visual testimony. Through a juxtaposition of pictorial gestures and figurative elements, she captures the shock, violence, and irreversibility that accompany the outbreak of war. Here, the artist offers a personal vision of the conflict in Lebanon in 2005, and her visual language leads us through an intense emotional field of contrasts, ruptures, and tensions.

A Vision of War: Painting as a Symbolic Burial

With Dérive, Hélène Goulet confronts the viewer with the unspeakable reality of war: the collective, anonymized death of civilians and soldiers. The image unfolds in a visual diptych where abstraction and figuration intertwine, but the emotional heart of the painting lies in the right-hand side, representing a mass grave. In this grave, we can see a succession of coffins, aligned, tightly packed, silent witnesses to interrupted lives.

This seemingly simple visual representation releases a powerful emotional charge. It communicates the cold and methodical horror of modern warfare, where death is no longer individual, but massive, organized, almost administered. The aligned coffins do not tell singular stories, but remind the viewer of the magnitude of a collective tragedy. Goulet does not show faces, does not paint bodies: she chooses to represent the receptacles of death, in their relentless repetition. This choice provokes a particular emotion: stupor at the sheer number, but also the icy silence of mourning.

The contrast between abstraction and burial

To the left of this mass grave, the artist deploys a powerful pictorial gesture: flashes of red, blue, and black, like a flaming sky covering the graves. This contrast underlines the gap between the visible and the invisible, between what remains on the surface, the bombings, the explosions, the flames, the lost lives.

The incandescent red symbolizes both the bloodshed and the fire of the bombings. The blue, in contrast, suggests a distant coldness, perhaps that of international indifference or shock. Together, these colors evoke a bruised sky, an atmosphere saturated with violence. Their abstraction, almost chaotic, translates the artist's inner emotions: anger, incomprehension, pain.

Below, the mass grave remains calm, silent, frozen. This visual silence is all the more striking because it responds to the expressive violence of the colors. The viewer finds himself caught between two emotional registers: explosion and silence, rage and mourning.

The Earth Ripped Open

The lower part of the canvas depicts a verdant landscape, a Lebanese field, but this land is now desecrated. It becomes both nourishing and a tomb. The luminous green, which should symbolize life, is crossed by dark lines and masses reminiscent of military vehicles. This fertile field, once a space for work and harvest, is now associated with collective death. The emotion conveyed is that of betrayal: the land that gave life becomes a receptacle for corpses, forever marked by war.

Drift conveys the paradox of a landscape that continues to be beautiful and luminous, but whose beauty clashes with subterranean horror. This duality evokes the contrast between the apparent banality of everyday life and the unspeakable violence that unfolds alongside it.

The March of History

On the right, the image of the monumental staircase, inscribed in the earth, takes on an even darker meaning in this context. It can be read as a metaphor for the collective process of war death: step by step, stage by stage, societies sink into the spiral of violence.

The soldiers, witnesses, and workers lining this staircase evoke the helpless or complicit crowd, spectators of a foretold tragedy. The steps also recall funeral processions, collective ceremonies where the dead are counted by the dozens, by the hundreds. Here, the staircase does not rise toward the light: it descends into the depths, toward mass graves, toward annihilation.

The dominant emotion is fatalism: once war begins, the process seems irreversible, guided by the inexorable mechanics of history.

A painting like a silent cry

The entire canvas functions as a silent scream. The viewer does not hear the sound of the bombs or the cries of the victims: he only sees their aftermath. The coffins, aligned and impersonal, speak volumes about the scale of the human disaster. The painting becomes a space of anticipated memory. Goulet paints not only what has been seen, but also what the war still promises to bring: an infinite multiplication of anonymous graves.

Anger is expressed in the nervous brushstrokes and saturated colors. Grief is expressed in the motionless shapes of the coffins. Anguish is evident in the staircase, a symbol of an inevitable collective destiny.

Thus, Dérive communicates several simultaneous emotional layers:

Shock at the scale of the deaths.
The pain of the anonymization of lost lives.
Anger at the absurd violence of war.
The fatalism of a historical process that crushes individuals.

Art as a symbolic burial

By transforming painting into a symbolic mass grave, Hélène Goulet gives art the function of a burial: a place of memory, contemplation, and denunciation. Where bodies are buried without a name, the canvas becomes a space of visibility. Where war reduces individuals to statistics, painting gives them a presence.

This work reminds the viewer that art, in the face of war, cannot be merely aesthetic: it becomes testimony, resistance, and a cry. Goulet does not represent war as a distant abstraction, but as an intimate experience of loss, anger, and grief.

A broader perspective

Hélène Goulet's paintings illustrate how war can become a brutal and unavoidable source of inspiration for an artist. Faced with violence and human loss, the artist is exposed to intense emotions: horror, indignation, compassion, but also a profound sense of helplessness. These experiences transform her outlook and nourish her creative process. War, with its tragic excess, imposes striking images that seek to find an outlet in art.

Les quatre toiles de la série Dérive d'Hélène Goulet

The visual elements that affirm the warlike dimension of these four paintings are manifested in several ways.

First, the fragmentation of faces and bodies : human silhouettes are only sketched, reduced to oval shapes or incomplete heads, as if erased by violence.

Next, the use of colors evokes the battlefield. The palette brutally contrasts the blazing red of blood and wounds with the deep, serious blue, while the acid yellows and greens accentuate the dramatic intensity of the scene.

Finally, the dynamics of chaos prevail. The compositions, far from any classical harmony, favor disorder, collision, and rupture, translating the confusion and brutality specific to the war experience.

Creating then becomes a way to transform chaos into visual language. The artist does not simply reproduce an event; he translates his inner experience, his revolt, his questions. The work bears the trace of a collective memory, but also of a subjectivity that gives it its expressive force. Colors, shapes, and composition become a means of expressing this flow of contradictory emotions: pain and beauty, destruction and hope. By integrating war into his art, the artist bears witness to, denounces, and makes visible realities that we often seek to forget. Thus, painting becomes both a personal catharsis and a universal appeal to human conscience.

Conclusion

The dominant emotion emanating from the work Dérive is a striking mixture of rage and mourning. The mass grave confronts the viewer with the implacable reality of collective death, while the colorful bursts of a burning sky express the brutality of the fighting. The verdant landscape transforms into a silent tomb, and the monumental staircase becomes the symbol of the inexorable march of war.

With this work, Hélène Goulet succeeds in transforming the unspeakable into visual language. She makes us feel not only the violence of the present moment, but also the weight of a future memory, that of the pits that will continue to line up as long as the war persists.

Author's Notes

I tracked down the exact event from which the photograph used for the collage, which inspired the artist, was taken from a newspaper clipping. It dates back to the 2005-2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. It documents the burial of civilian victims in a mass grave in Tyre, a major port city in southern Lebanon. It depicts a series of numbered coffins, arranged with almost clinical rigor in a shallow trench, testifying both to the precarious dignity accorded to the dead and the brutality of the circumstances. The image on the right, reprinted in The Guardian newspaper , was released by the Associated Press.