Much like the op-art of Bridget Riley, the paintings of Helen French confront the viewer with their decorative intensity. Colour and linear form multiply in a profusion akin to microscopic life. The tightly woven grid-like patterns that she uses surely have some relationship to her earlier career as a textile designer, yet she has managed to develop this language of lines far beyond its initial inspiration in the weave and design of fabrics.

Her paintings radiate energy in ways that manage to be both explosive and introspective. Lines intersect and wiggle like crazy ripples across each canvas, at times suggesting organic forms such as roots or brain tissue, at other times with the slightly more objective feeling of topographical maps or stained glass. French's application of paint is considered and deliberate, indicative of a certain emotional detachment that counterpoints her intense arrangements of colour and form. When the paintings work there is a remarkable sense of balance that exudes an underlying tension. Colour sings in harmony with the graphical elements, creating a unified composition that is more than the sum of its parts. Her peers in this respect are artists like Klee and Hundertwasser, artists who also loved to 'take a line for a walk'.

Although French's works are admittedly studies for larger paintings, some of them are not as resolved as others. In those that are less successful the lines meander somewhat uncertainly, and the brushwork appears overly hesitant. The best paintings are those in which pattern is firmly structured, and colour is anchored by a dominant hue. The viewer is then struck by an overall relationship, a gestalt negating the physical surface of the canvas, and is transported into an imaginative realm of fecund and fantastic growth.

As well as paintings on canvas there are a number of works using cotton thread, delicate black tangles reminiscent of spiderweb or pubic hair. These are gothic abstractions of formlessness, capable of seducing or repulsing the viewer in the manner of a Dubuffet. They highlight the control of chaos that is a key element in French's art at its best. Like outsider artists, such as Martin Ramirez, she uses the repetition of distortion to structure otherwise uncontrollable energies and fields of force. In some pictures this is also overlaid with a Mondrian grid, and in others there is a central mandala form that is reminiscent of the work of Georgia O'Keefe.

Helen French has been a steady and prolific artist, exploring a form of abstraction that is intensely personal while also informed by various art historical influences. Diversity is a good thing in itself, yet the installation at Intrude is perhaps too ambitious in trying to survey her whole range of idioms within a limited space. More room is required around the works to allow them to breathe. Ideally each deserves a bare room of its own, in which it would pulsate in an almost physical way, communicating its own intrinsic and ineffable message. The paintings of Helen French are fragments of an unruly cosmos, where chaos is tempered by tenderness in an endless dance of delight.

Jason Beale 2006