Humanistic discoveries are always painful. It is always a necessity to question one’s own values, life choices, and biographical events. The achievements of recent decades have made many terrible everyday practices (abuse, domestic violence, etc.) not only visible but also consciously condemned. Humanity is the naming of evil as evil and the active self-restraint of one’s own words and actions in order to create a space of care, comfort, and safety for oneself and others. Artists are an important part of society, allowing them to clothe direct activist statements in relevant artistic form and thereby open a new front for informing, warning, and preventing everyday evil. Humanist artists are an important part of the activist spectrum of contemporary art. They literally seek new ways of expressing the existence of art, do not forget to follow high professional standards, and are also extremely responsible for their own artistic message and are aware of their responsibility to the audience.

Artist Hellga Io meticulously explores the fragility and strength of those who should be protected by society. Her heroines are fragile and traumatised children and girls, existing in strange, absurd worlds and fighting with irrational things. The heroines have allies and enemies, their own locations, and their own weapons. Each of them seems to have found a way to fight against harassment (the painting “Gardener”), homelessness and aimlessness (the painting “World of Hellga”), the death of themselves, loved ones, and the world (the painting “Cake”), and even personal loss of human form (the painting “Heavenly Bird”). These works are laconic but full of details, contrasting, and surrealistic. These are super-emotional compositions; they seem to be encoded messages of terrible experience, which, on the one hand, do not hide the nightmare of what happened to the heroines and, on the other hand, give hope that any evil can be conquered. This hope is purely therapeutic in nature and can instill confidence and a sense of calm in the viewer—yes, that rare sense of calm that seemed to have finally left our world, disturbed by wars and epidemics, and a sense of total unpredictability of the future.

The unique and outstanding art of Hellga Io performs four incredibly important functions that legitimise it and distinguish it from a number of similar artists. First, her works develop the imagery of modern minimalist visuality (Hellga Io usually uses only three colours: black and red on a white canvas). Her works are an active expansion of boundaries, a pointer to even greater frontiers of freedom, and keys from the shackles that restrain many artists. Secondly, her works are a documentation of the achievements of modern humanism, ranging from the first feminist initiatives to modern revisions of the provisions of mass religions. Thirdly, her paintings carry a powerful interactive and performative charge and reinvent exhibition strategies for this kind of artwork. And fourthly, these works operate at a very subtle level of actualisation of the rarest category of “tragic worldview,” which is an absolute audacity and an absolute feat in our postdramatic era.

The art of Hellga Io is complex and simple, accessible and hermetic, sincere and playful. I strongly recommend that you follow the release of new paintings by this wonderful artist and thereby train your emotionality and expand the space of aesthetic experiences.