Helena Almeida

After graduating in Painting at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, she had her first individual painting exhibition at the Buchholz gallery in 1967. Her work immediately revealed her conceptual concern with the significance of support; her geometric canvas, with a proclivity towards monochromatism, suggests a flight into the canvas's outer edges. ¶ Throughout the 70s, Almeida's work gradually broke away from traditional formats and methods. The surface of the canvas is as if interrupted by incidens, caused by the use of daily objects or horsehair. The disciplinary definition of her artistic practice is blurred, and drawing, installation and sculpture are brought together on the pictorial surface. ¶ It is, however, when Almeida begins to use photography as her preferred medium that she becomes an integrant part of the international avant-gardes, not to mention the fact that she contributes for the promotion of photography as a validated protagonist in the visual arts. From then onwards, up to the present, a time of both national acclaim and international recognition, her work has consisted of photographic representations of herself as she performs a series of specific movements in her studio. ¶ Helena Almeida's work is a far-reaching research on the support. Whether using photography, video or painting, the question is always focused on the canvas and the body, considering both their nature as supports and the tension that occurs between the two. It is a tension between worlds that exist on both sides of such an imponderable border separating representation from the represented, and the attempt to rise above it by means of transgression practices. In Helena Almeida's work, the body dreams of becoming a canvas as much as the canvas dreams of becoming a body, in the sense that the aspiration of the body is to achieve the canonical rigidity of the canvases, and the canvas yearns for the dissolute corruptibility of the human body. There is a somewhat cinematographic effect in the resulting dialectic between the two contradictory - if not paradoxical - urges. We also come to understand that the chaotic is nothing but the residue of the canonical. ¶ From here to eternity, the artist's body is prone to ambiguity, capsizing the representation-represented axis and reflecting back the gaze we concede it as a gaze upon ourselves.

 

• 
• 
• 
•