Picture a crowded opera house in Tel Aviv awaiting an opening premiere of a famous play by one of Israel’s most prized playwrights now commissioned by the Israeli Opera. The play, The Child Dreams (1993) by Hanoch Levin, is the first of the famous playwright’s works to be written for the opera; a prestigious event marking the tenth anniversary of Levin’s death. The Child Dreams (1993) portrays a surreal story of war and loss through the eyes of a child. This epic tale brings ornate costumes and sets, emotive voices, and intense drama into the opera house, creating a cacophonous experience unmatched by any other type of performance.

The same narrative theatricality bellows out of Helnwein's latest body of work—made in memory of Levin—on view at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. Based on Helnwein's set and costume design for an adaptation of The Child Dreams for the Israeli Opera, each luscious painting inherits the set’s rich color and texture and emits the powerful experience felt in the opera house. The centerpiece of the exhibition, The Child Dreams 6, is a massive image of children floating through the thick, rich red space of the painting. Caught between falling and dance movements, the field of children resembles a dreamy mobile hanging overhead and encapsulates the opera’s drama and elegance. Each child is dressed in a surreal conflation of dance costume and bandages coated in a bloody red. The Child Dreams 1-5 present elegantly painted single figures seemingly captured from The Child Dreams 6. The figures in The Child Dreams 1-5 leave the darkness and drama of the larger painting behind and accentuate the floating elegance of dance. This is a welcome reprieve to the more intense images presented in Modernism Gallery’s space; taken together, the sequencing of works in the gallery evokes the rhythm and timing of opera.

Helnwein's ability to create a dramatic visual space is surely present in this series of paintings; each image captures surreal space. In the three paintings entitled Murmur of the Innocents, tightly painted figures frozen in the midst of a movement instantly recall film frames. The dramatic shifts in palette from cold blues and greys to bright and aggressive reds give way to overly dramatic representations of the children, losing the soft and surreal colors and sumptuous painting style of The Child Dreams.

The Child Dreams allow for a more experiential approach to image construction, giving viewers a chance to respond to the images’ color and emotion rather than their painting style and pictorial space. Because of this, The Child Dreams offers a more visceral encounter with color and texture left unmatched by Murmur of the Innocents. Murmur of the Innocents draws pictorial space and color from film, whereas The Child Dreams adopts stronger cues from the emotion of the theater, leaving the viewer to react to the shifts in emotion and influence. 

Helnwein’s technical skill at creating hyperreal pictorial space in painting only accentuates the images’ theatrical nature, leaving them somewhere between film and painting. Transferring the drama and tension often found in his paintings into the set and costume design of the opera seems fitting—his hand appears subtly in the creation of the operatic production of Levin’s play. Yet this subtlety is lost in Helnwein’s incorporation of the performance back into painting. The drama is reduced, the narrative is undermined and the result is less than what was evidently intended. The mix of theater and painting in this body of work creates yet another confusing layer of mediums. One medium simply reduces the other and leaves the viewer with an artifact of the action, instead of the drama of the ongoing moment felt in the opera house.