Helena Almeida
Lisbon (Portugal), 1934

With a degree in painting from the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, Helena Almeida is the daughter of the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida, mother of the artist Joana Rosa, and wife of Artur Rosa, architect and sculptor who also takes her photographs. For more than thirty years, the artistic career of this Portuguese artist has been confirmed as the bearer of an expressive language in which diverse disciplines and attitudes converge. Although she is usually considered a photographer, her work is closely related to other areas of fine art, such as painting and sculpture, due to the meticulous process of elaboration of the images as well as the employment of pigments and complementary materials in these productions. Her creative discourse is based on self-representation. The works are not mere self-portraits, for the artist always appears as model, staging distinct facets of her life: as author or mother, making visual statements about her personal doubts. Her compositions usually consist of sequenced scenes staged in a filmic fashion, with set up spaces where Almeida manages to pinpoint her subjectivity. Despite deploying her own body -and the personal experience implied therein- as the basis of her work, there is no place in Almeida’s art for autobiographical tales. Instead, she demonstrates her physiognomy as her sole media and means of communication (Ouve-me, 1979). The artist and her body are always the protagonists: their forms, their postures and their relationships with the objects in her studio are the principle categories of interaction employed (O Atelier, 1983). This self-representation through the photographic language is ultimately meant as an exploration of the limits of representation; we ought to keep in mind that her origins coincide with the boom of performance art and the debate regarding conceptual art. While Helena Almeida introduces herself into the picture, the painting procedures are situated outside the image, on top of the black-and-white photograph. The artist occasionally becomes a great black stain (Espaço espesso, 1982; Negro Agudo, 1983) or her body allows itself to be polluted by colourful brushstrokes dirtying her figure (Perdao, 1993). Her images, then, are born of painting, a discipline with which she experimented during the decade of the seventies in order to conclude by identifying the picture-object with the author in works such as Desenho Habitado or Pintura Habitada, both from 1975. Despite her more than evident relation with performance and body-art, the artist subjects her entire creative process to a preconceived image, producing meticulous sketches prior to settling on the desired representation. What we contemplate is only the result of a complex action that very likely involves a long and careful elaboration. A. S.

Seduzir (#9), 2002

The series Seduzir (Seduce) was presented at the Helga Alvear gallery in Madrid before an audience that was already familiar with the Portuguese artist’s work due to the extensive retrospective exhibitions devoted to Helena Almeida at the Casa de América (Madrid, 1998) and at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago de Compostela, 2000). Both shows provided an opportunity to consider her entire body of work, which from the outset has comprised an exceptional conceptually coherent and expressively forceful creative career.
The photographs from this series, pertaining to the artist’s mature period, portray large-scale images of Helena Almeida’s torso and limbs in postures aimed at captivating the spectator’s gaze. The author foreshortens her hands and feet, which become sharply emphasized by the employment of red paint, or wire in the smaller-scale images.
Whereas in the beginning, the use of the pigments was meant to endow the images with movement (Pintura Habitada, 1976), in Seduzir their use becomes an “addition” meant to fix the pose adopted by Almeida. With her stereotypical gestures, the artist was being ironic about the codes of seduction employed in our daily lives. By becoming the seducer, she subtly reveals the context in which the image ought to be received. Her “flirting” with the spectator seems to be conducive to the complicity of laughter.
As opposed to Dentro de mim, 1998 -the other of Almeida’s series presented at the Madrid venue that consisted of a cinema -like choreography in which the body deposited pigments as it moved through the spaces-, Seduzir (#9) offers an image of the lower part of Helena Almeida’s body. With her back to spectators, the artist seems to wish to capture their attention through enticing gestures: taking off her shoe, she uncovers the red stain dirtying the sole of her foot. The author thus makes manifest her full physical involvement with the materials employed. According to Isabel Carlos, the curator of the exhibition held at the Casa de América, the colours utilized by Almeida on the photographs are bearers of psychological and symbolic messages: blue is a metaphor for space and energy (Estudo para Um Enriquecimento Interior, 1977); white represents purity or purification (Perdao, 1993); the black pigments are allegories for density and light absorption; red symbolises staging and dramatisation (Sem Título, 1994-1995). In some way, with this piece, Almeida takes a critical stance regarding the customary rules of conduct, revealing how society and its codes, as well as our behaviour, respond to fictitious patterns that hide fears and concerns that we alone are aware of. A. S.