Helena ALMEIDA (1934)

Helena Almeida was born in Lisbon in 1934. She completed a Painting degree at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon.

Her broadly ranging work (painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and engraving), has photography as its common denominator.

The artist held her first solo exhibition at the Galeria Buchholz in 1967, exhibiting an abstract geometric painting in orange and blue and questioning the nature and function of the painting media and the frame (CAMJAP collection). Even at this early stage the first signs of attempting to physically transgress the canvas are present in the way the artist slides the canvas out of the frame and away from where the painting is supposed to be. In the years that followed, the artist explored installations made with domestic objects and utensils (plastic flowers, tulle) and created drawings with strands of horse hair. The latter works enabled plane and volume to coexist in a delicate but powerful submission to the physicality of the line. In a performance, documented on video (CAMJAP collection), the phrase “listen to me” was written on a piece of paper over her mouth, and it appeared that she sucked at the word from the back of the paper. This relates to a series of photographs (1979) where a writing of a word “sewed up” her lips as if it were string. In 1969 she had her husband Artur Rosa, a sculptor and architect, photograph her holding a light crimson canvas.

In the 70s the artist made a deep investigation into the effects of “attempting to open a space at any cost” in the series of “Inhabited” paintings and drawings. In the work, Tela Habitada (Inhabited Canvas, 1976), Helena Almeida represents and utilises her own body in a sequence of photographs where she simulates tearing through a canvas. Although, at a certain moment, the artist appears to have succeeded, the penultimate photograph makes it obvious that she has not, thus suggesting that trying again is a cyclical and never-ending process.

In the work Corte Secreto (Secret Cut, 1981), which is part of the CAMJAP’s collection, it is also the tear that organises the artist’s entrance into the space of the canvas or paper. The questioning and deconstruction of the space of the work and that which envelops it, of the place of the artist on the inside and outside of these spaces or on the frontiers between them, is this work’s conceptual framework.

In 1980, Helena Almeida discovered black – or rather its particularly complicit nature towards a certain photographic process – engendering large photosensitive canvases. In 1987 a set of 262 photographs on paper entitled Frisos (Friezes) were exhibited at the CAMJAP.

Meanwhile the artist continued to pursue her installation work, her drawings in horse hair, and her photographs where her own image remains a constant. In one of the photographs from the series Seduzir (To Seduce), a foot uncovered by a fallen shoe exhibits a blood-like smear of paint. If the hand lifts a bit of the skirt in a “coquette” gesture and the high heeled shoes reinforce it, two aspects disrupt the choreographic intent: the body is a black shape, formless and headless, focusing the onlooker’s eyes on the skin of the legs and the feet, and on an unexpected blot that has dyed a hidden part of the body red, and hints at the disguised violence that it, and some games of seduction, may contain. Traditionally the hands accomplish a painting, but in this work the foot takes on this task, as a passive agent (the medium for the brushstroke) and also as an active agent of movement, of surprise, of the colour and the paint in a black and white photograph, and of a charged metaphorical disturbance.

Swallowing, secreting, integrating, hiding, dripping, acting out, inhabiting, and locating painting in relation to the body, both with it and in it – have been this artist’s lifetime project.
Amongst the artist’s numerous exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, the following selection is particularly worthy of mention: the 1995 exhibition at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto, her exhibitions at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo and Santiago de Compostela, in 2000, and recently, the show at the Galerie im Taxispalais (2003), in Innsbruck, Áustria. Pés no Chão, Cabeça no Céu (Feet on the Ground, Head in the Sky) is the title of the significant selected exhibition held in March 2004 at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.

MARIA ALMEIDA LIMA