ART CITIES:Paris-Helena Almeida
Helena Almeida from the beginning of her career has developed a body of work, which started with the process of exploring the limits of painting, transforming ideas and experiences into images. She combined Performance Art with photography, painting and drawing in compositions that examined space and drew attention to the surface of the work.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Jeu De Paume Archive
Helena’s Almeida long career has allowed her to gain a reputation from the ‘70s onward as one of the leading figures of Performance and Conceptual Art. The exhibition “Corpus” has a retrospective dimension, spanning the different phases of the artist’s career, from her earliest pieces dating from the mid-‘60s up until her more recent work. Following her early three-dimensional works, the artist found in photography a means of overcoming the exteriority of painting, and of allowing “Being” and “Doing” to coexist in the same medium, “As if I were continuing to affirm: my painting is my body, my work is my body”. The body in Almeida’s work becomes both a sculptural form and a space, object and subject, signifier and signified. The artist’s work is a summary, an act that has been carefully staged, and one that is highly poetic. The representations of these actions also show the context in which Almeida positioned herself. Despite being her own model, her works are not self-portraits, rather, she uses her body as an object, producing carefully choreographed images in which the body undergoes a number of actions: from wearing a canvas, to turning her back to the camera and provocatively lifting the hem of her skirt. She once remarked on her own presence in her work: “I wasn’t going to hire a model when I myself was in the studio… I know what positions I need to place myself in, which postures I should assume and how to understand the settings… But it’s not me. It’s as though I were another person”. The legacy of Conceptual Art is tangible in Almeida’s appropriation of the striking blue strokes of paint she often employed, reminiscent of Yves Klein’s Blue. These flashes of colour appear repeatedly in Almeida’s work, menacingly blotting out the artist’s face in one image, and operating as barrier that Almeida is tearing apart with her hands in another. Almeida disagreed with Klein’s use of women in his own practice, and responded to it with artistic ferocity, tenaciously tearing the colour apart and emerging from the supposed void behind. “Intus”, is an example of her more recent work. It can be characterized by the relationship between the artist’s body and space and makes use of photography in order to retrace a Performance of the artist within the private space of her studio. Nevertheless, the same question continues to underlie Helena Almeida’s work: how can the body and the movement of the body (always that of the artist) succeed in creating a work of art.
Info:Curators: João Ribas and Marta Almeida, Jeu De Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, Paris, Duration: 9/2-22/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue 11:00-21:00, Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.jeudepaume.org
