This is one of the emblematic works with which Helena Almeida presented herself in the Portuguese Pavilion, commissioned by Ernesto de Sousa (1921-1988), at the 1982 Venice Biennial. In these years of affirmation and development of a career, now internationally recognized, the latter – artist, film director and critic, who marked the Portuguese intellectual context of the time – was one of the chosen interlocutors of Helena Almeida.

It consists of a large canvas, suspended from the ceiling, in which a body appears to enter an open fissure in the wall. The election of this form and method of exhibition reinforces the relationship with architecture, another important component in Almeida’s work.

If painting is representation, shapes, light, then what is architecture? It is the physical, heavy, enormous materialization of a drawing: the passage of a trace into mass and volume. It is the utmost physical or bodily becoming of a space conceived out of points, directions, tensions, glimpses from the in and outside, interior and exterior views, facades and walls, windows and doors, skirting boards and ceilings. In this image, all of this is implied in the body, traversing, or traversed by, two “places”.

IC

May 2010