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DENSITY AND GRAVITY |
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Helena Almeida is representing Portugal at the next Venice Biennale, and along with Paula Rego is a key figure in Portuguese art.Her ideas on space, the body, anonymity, the role of the artist and the use of photography for reducing distances in comparison with traditional techniques are a measure of the importance of her work among artists of her generation and a stimulation to continue her intensive approach to art.
Isabel Carlos, curator of this year’s Portuguese Pavilion, reviews some of the principal features of her work.
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| Helena Almeida. Sense títol, 2004 |
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ISABEL CARLOS
Since the 1970’s Almeida’s work has evidenced the coming together of different artistic disciplines and approaches. In it, photography, painting, drawing and performance are all brought together within the unifying scope of self-representation. The artist’s body and the images inherent to it - from the hands to the mouth, from the face to the entire body - will be brought out as the works develops, never as self-portraits, but never as a mise en scène or dramatization of other characters or figures either, rather as the reiterative presence of herself. It will never be brought out as an existent description or representation - we learn nothing of the nature of the artist (personality, tastes, thoughts, conception of the world) by looking at her photographs.
Almeida, in creating neither characters nor self-portraits, tells us nothing about her actual physical body. Rather, this body is constantly altered, disfigured, hidden by the paint, which either prolongs it, spills it out or enters or exits the body. Nevertheless we might regard her first photographic works as in some way self-portraits as in “Estudo para um enriquecimento interior” (1977), where you can recognize a face. But more than a self-portrait, this work can be seen, above all else, as a woman’s image, which is transformed into a painting: handling painting, eating painting, and crying painting. She herself is the painting.
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In negotiating self-representation, Almeida brings together different artistic disciplines and approaches. Most importantly, she is a process-based artist. However, unlike many of her contemporaries who began exhibiting in the 1970’s, the process remains hidden. The process as such is private. The studio is her world.
Rather than creating works for specific sites or places, the artists affirms that her place is the studio and the studio is her world. In this sense, she works like a classical painter. She creates works specific to her space, and references the works she makes to the space in which she's made them, giving rise to a process which carries away her own domesticity, placing surprise in that space, one generally of day-to-day recognition. In the studio Almeida always works with her husband Artur Rosa. She makes story boards and, more recently, videos to direct her collaborator towards the final resolution of the work.
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| Helena Almeida. Sense títol, 2004 |
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These visual aids are like diagrams, which illustrate how Almeida’s operates as a formal vehicle. “I am the canvas” she once stated.
In terms of photography she reveals it as a medium as it allows for (and motivates) the use of series, or meta-narratives, of small movements, some of them almost fictional, marking the different times of a movement.
The body of the artist, becomes an instrument with which to mediate and communicate, to create space, pictorial and architectonical space, in a phenomenological sense. This creation of space is quite clear in the work “Untitled” (1994-95), where she creates a kind of intimate minimalist choreography in which her body crosses space thus creating tensions and escaping routes – a hand simply holding color, an arm slightly behind as if wanting to grab onto the previous moment in time or hold onto vestiges and trails of previous events.
The space its never an abstract space that is measurable, but rather an inhabited space, whose form is the body. We might even speak of bodily architecture – the body as house and home. The image is inhabited inside its own walls, showing itself to the outside.
Colors are employed as carriers of psychological symbolic messages: blue for space and energy; red for drama and composition and black for density and absorption of light.
Density, that is one of the words that crossed my mind when I looked for the first time at “Untitled” (2003), the work showed in Centro de Arte Santa Monica . There is no ink or painting but only the body as a black sculptural mass, even the body shape |
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escapes from us, only a foot or an arm remind us that it is still a body and not only a pure, concrete material of a sculpture displayed in a empty space, in a perfect clean stone floor. Density and gravity, the body in its essential and primary nature.
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Paradoxically, the presence of her body in Almeida’s work is the presence of an absence, of something to which we do not have access. On the other hand, what we see isn’t what the artist herself saw – her vision is contained inside the work. Against the self-referencing employed by the modernist painting, Almeida proposes self-representation. Against the absence of the photographer’s appearance and regard – a characteristic of photography – Helena proposes her own presence. Against the ephemerallity nature of performance art, Almeida proposes – in contrast - an action captured for eternity.
The continuous search of a self-knowledge, an attitude the artist asserts in some interviews, runs parallel to a search of the limits and boundaries of artistic genres using her own body.
The body is the place where limits are confronted. The limit of the body itself, but also the limit of artistic disciplines: “I always see my own figure as an object – on representing myself, I move from subject to object” (Helena Almeida).
SOME PAVILIONS OF THE VENICE BIENNALE 2005:
Germany: Thomas Scheibitz, Tino Sehgal
Argentina: Jorge Macchi
Austria: Hans Schabus
Belgium: Honoré D'o
Brazil: Chelpa Ferro i Caio Reisewitz
Canada: Rebecca Belmore
Denmark: Eva Koch, Joachim Koester, Peter Land, Ann Lislegaar, Gitte Villesen
USA.: Ed Ruscha
Egypt: Nagui Farid, Salah Hammad
Slovenia: Vadim Fiškin
Spain: Antoni Muntadas
France: Annette Messager
United Kingdom: Gilbert & George
Greece: George Hadjimichalis
Netherlands: Jeroen De Rijke & Willem De Rooij
Iran: Bita Fayyazi Azad, Mandana Moghaddam
Israel: Guy Ben Ner
Italy: Carolina Raquel Antich, Manfredi Beninati, Loris Cecchini, Lara Favaretto
Japan: Miyako Ishiuchi
Switzerland: Gianni Motti, Shahryar Nashat, Marco Poloni,
Ingrid Wildi, Pipilotti Rist
Turkey: Hussein Chalayan
Uruguay: Lacy Duarte
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