At first glance, the works from The Eternal Life series by Helena Schultheis Edgeler appear as if we are looking into someone's dream or subconscious. They are a visual representation of a space that simultaneously belongs to the past and the future, to memory and anticipation. In these scenes, time loses its usual flow and becomes layered. Historical details, monumental architecture, and traces of a technological future – or even of our current reality – intertwine and blend into a new hybrid reality. As viewers, we enter spaces that feel strangely familiar yet entirely alien, as if we are observing a world still in formation or one that slowly comes apart.
Schultheis Edgeler has been working with the theme of artificial intelligence since 2017, long before it became part of our everyday life and public discussions. In her earlier works, she was exploring art-historical heritage through references to various authors and visual approaches –from Duchamp's shifts in the understanding of artwork, Cranach's and Raphael's compositional models, through explorations of movement in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, to more contemporary approaches by David Hockney and Masami Teraoka, as noted by curator Nada Beroš in the foreword to the artist's exhibition Put It In The Cloud. These influences served as the starting point from which the artist developed her distinctive style. In her more recent works, however, this relationship has changed. Although she continues to place figures in spaces that remind of monumental churches, palaces, and ceremonial halls, the artist liberates herself from the weight of art-historical heritage and turns towards her own mental landscapes.
The spaces she creates appear like internal realms of collective and personal memory –places where traces of the past, imagination, and the future come together. High arches, massive columns, and monumental structures produce a sense of grandeur, but also a subdued unease. Everything feels so elusive that these spaces seem to belong more to human consciousness than to the physical world.
In her new series, titled The Eternal Life, continuing on Deus Machina from 2023, the artists takes a step further and deals with concrete problems. Painting The Escape, for instance, depicts a moment in which artificial intelligence frees itself from human constraints. Several AI entities emerge before us, whose interests and conflicts entwine with one another, but also clash with people. On the other hand, The Edict speaks more directly about the problems of contemporary society and politics, touching on the rise of the radical right, the cult of power, and an increasingly pervasive sense of threat. In this work, artificial intelligence takes on forms of human behavior but pushes people to a disturbing extreme, almost to the point of caricature. Armed figures, familiar from the Deus Machina series, appear here as a clear sign of hidden aggression and conflict that is about to erupt any second.
These personifications of artificial intelligence are no longer just technological tools or passive computational systems. They become living beings with their own relationships, problems, and interests. Their human appearance is not intended to facilitate identification, but to generate new identities at the very threshold between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the natural and the artificial. It is precisely within this tension between the real and the simulated, between historical experience and technological projection, that paintings of a melancholic and somewhat somber atmosphere are created, paintings that function simultaneously as a warning and as a poetic meditation on the times we live in.
Dora Lučić

 

Helena Schultheis Edgeler is a Croatian visual artist working in painting, video and animation, with a particular focus on experimental film. She has been exhibiting for more than thirty years in solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. She is employed at the Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, where she is a full professor teaching drawing and painting courses. In her work, she combines classical painting techniques with digital tools, occasionally using AI-generated visual prompts as a starting point for works in traditional media. In the cycles Deus Machina and Life Eternal she addresses the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, as well as themes of memory, future and transformation, which she presents through figurative compositions.