Helena Almeida - Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire

Helena Almeida
A visit to Helena Almeida's studio or to one of her exhibitions will always provoke feelings of
enthusiasm, admiration and, why not admit it, a certain perplexity. Admiration and enthusiasm,
because Helena Almeida is a magnificent artist whose profoundly personal and original work is
extremely coherent; and perplexity because how do you categorize an artist who has always
used photography to express her ideas, her experiences, but who does not take photographs?
An artist who presents the photographs of her actions or performances but who is not a creator
of performance art, who always uses her body as the subject of her art but who does not
create Body art. Her works are the reflection, the representation of her ideas, but not
Conceptual art.
When I say that her art is not conceptual, it is because although her ideas do unavoidably come
together in her work, it is really the mise en scéne of her need to communicate, to attract the
viewer, so to this end she transforms her subjective ideas and experiences into images, images
which attract our attention in the same way as painting itself. Our sensitive and visual attention.
If I say that she does not create Body art, it is because Helena Almeida's photographs do not
manifest the body as a living entity, nor do they say anything as to its physicality; they do,
however, transmit a meticulous and existential reflection on the inward-looking nature of her
work.
Helena Almeida uses her body both as an object and a subject, as significant and significance,
manipulating it as if it were a painting, or a (poetic) literary composition.
By using herself as an image, she expresses the distance existing between the model and what
the model is representing, placing herself as the artist in real space and the spectator in virtual
space.
Helena Almeida transforms her body into an interceding instrument in order to create images,
spaces.. "My work is my body, my body is my work", the artist tells us.
When I say that Helena Almeida is not an artist who can be categorized within performance art
it is because I see her work as a mise en scéne by means of a photographic documentation,
arranged in series on many occasions, in which her own body is transformed into support and
image, into spaces which narrate fragments in motion, like sequences of a film, into
performances not of a theatrical nature but of a pictorial one.
Almost the only thing that she shares with other performance artists is the use of her body as
the subject of her work, but the presence of her body is more like the absence of the person,
the representation of something we do not have access to. When we do not have information
about the course the work has taken at the precise time it is captured, we have to use our
intuition, the course having been translated into acts and reconfigured artistically. Her
photographs are never the documentation of the performance.

Helena Almeida also reacts to the ephemeral nature of the performance by presenting us with a
work intended to be permanent
And finally, although Helena Almeida expresses herself almost only through photography, she is
not a photographer" In her works we do not see the vision of the photographer; characteristic
of photography, but her own vision, the vision of the subject-object represented
As photographs, they are a record of her work But at the same time they are questioning and
transgressing the photographic medium or support and if we analyze it we understand why the
artist herself tells us" "I paint the painting and draw the drawing", when referring to her work
Helena Almeida's photographs are drawings when her hands or her pen play with the lines the
horsehair creates; they are paintings when she colours them with those blue or red lines which
she traces with her hand, covering her body or filling her mouth when the blacks and whites
are pure dramatic tension, like a presence living within.
They are performances or choreographies when her body appears and disappears from behind
a canvas, when her studio wall is the spatial limit which can not be surpassed.
They are sculptures when the movement of her body is the theme, the subject-object of the
photo.
María de Corral, Curator of the Exhibition
At the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea
14 January to 19 March 2001