Phoebe Helander’s first solo exhibition in New York City, Paintings from the Orange Room at P·P·O·W, is an auspicious debut consisting of nearly fifty intimate still lifes that make legible her attention to objects over time. On imperfect wood panels approximately the size of a book spread, Helander paints various flowers, burning candles, and quotidian possessions—a folding mirror, a packet of matches, a stack of dollar bills, a halved lemon—deploying subtle formal strategies to convey her observations. Helander made each of the works on view in a single session lasting between four and ten hours, continually describing the item at hand according to the shifting conditions of light and form.
This endeavor becomes particularly dramatic when Helander takes burning candles as her subject. As she paints these self-destructing objects, the beeswax melts and congeals in new shapes, the wick grows tiny burls, and the flame alternatively flares and diminishes to a smolder. In a recent talk at the New York Studio School, the artist likened the pursuit of these transient features to chasing a runaway train. “My goal,” she said, “is to stay with the flame.” From this process, Helander creates images that simultaneously contain a duration of time (metaphorized as the accretion of wax) and articulate a decisive moment (the flame). Of the eighteen candles in the show, the most recently ignited are Candle Burning III (2024) and Candle Burning XIII (for Ines) (2025), which maintain their original shapes even as their rims begin to blush with heat. Both Candle Burning IX and X (both 2025) portray a wide, stubby candle cupping a pool of melted wax, blazing hot as it nears the end of its life. In Candle Burning XIV (for Aaron & Jacob) (2025), Helander zooms in on the blackened wick, its burls enveloped by roiling strokes of orange, blue, and brown.
The most poignant of the Paintings from the Orange Room are self-evident in their condensation of time, even if the ephemerality of the subject matter is not quite as obvious as that of a melting candle. For starters, there is the monolithic Unlit Candle (2025), whose pristine wick functions as a sundial, casting a fanned-out shadow on the undisturbed plateau of wax below. Encircling the candlestick are gradations of shadow applied in short, meticulous strokes, in which Helander has managed to inscribe the slow passage of hours.
In her paintings of bowls of liquid, the artist conjures an atmosphere of enduring stasis. Branch with surface tension (2025) shows a leafy green plant in a bowl of cool water, surrounded by fallen leaves. The order of operations is key: she painted the tabletop and bowl, abraded large swaths of the painting’s surface, and then added the water and plant. The bowl and the tabletop it rests upon are partly erased from the scene, conflating these elements in their mutual degeneracy. Vitalized by contrast, the motionless water assumes a spiritual peace—the kind only found in spaces long left dormant.
Set in the room of flowers, the close-up Cold rose in a warm room (2024) peers into the heart of a yellow flower head. The rose is built outward from its center point in increasingly lyrical brushstrokes, intimating the gradual unfurling of densely overlapped petals. Here and elsewhere, Helander communicates the passage of time in much the same way as a long-exposure photograph would, with still points precisely described and movement rendered in degrees of painterly fluidity.
In two pairs of paintings, Helander attends to the same arrangement at different points in its lifespan. Poppies (2025) depicts a skinny vase holding several buds alongside yellow, pink, and orange poppies, sun-soaked and erect. Poppies II (2025), presumably painted days or weeks later, bears the sour green tinge of death; the same flowers droop lifelessly, clinging to the side of the glass. Cut buds in a red glass (2025) shows a blood-red sundae glass containing four immature stalks on a tabletop littered with studio detritus: a screw, several cut stems, a dark chalk pastel, and a tube of paint that barely pokes its nose into the picture. In the duller Cut buds in a red glass II (2025), the glass and its wizened contents have been knocked on their side, reflecting cherry-red light on the ground.
Helander also offers several images of a more metaphysical character, apparently drawn from life before taking a turn towards unreality. The central action of Flower Pieces (2025), for instance, registers as a floral glitch in the matrix—three pieces of plant matter, perhaps components of a single deconstructed blossom, are sketched midair while a bell-shaped flower head sulks in the lower left quadrant. In Rose (2024), Helander painted the titular flower in her usual mode before scraping off the entire corolla, leaving a yellowish haze through which only its essential structure is discernible. It seems as though Helander was initially after more objective paintings and arrived at hallucinatory abstractions partway through each procedure. These enigmatic works indicate that Helander’s process is not solely a means to an end, but they do forgo the perceptual thoroughness that makes her full-fledged flowers so arresting.
For comparison, consider Flowers in a plastic bag (2025): a pot of primroses rests atop bunched-up plastic, radiant within an otherwise dim setting. The bag’s zagging folds catch the soft red and blue light of the room. The pale yellow primroses are like paper-thin suns whose every petal are marked by short, searing orange lines emanating from the pistil. The plant’s large, dark green leaves are vaguely painted in, except for one that reaches forward from the pot, catching a sliver of light on its veined surface. As with all of Helander’s most magical paintings, this commonplace scene makes it impossible to deny that beauty hides in plain sight. We need only take the time to look.