This work by Helena Almeida belongs to the first phase of her artistic development, characterized by three-dimensional paintings. The conventional canvas support is explored through its physical and architectural concreteness.

Her work is thus, from the start, a critical exercise on and about painting – critical in the etymological sense of crisis and growth – in which the artist dismantles the logical structure and the perception of painting. The Renaissance concept of the painting as window is here taken to its limit by the transformation of the canvas into a kind of physical window. As such, it is factual but completely functionless: this “window” doesn’t overlook a landscape or scene, but only an orange color plane and the concrete wall on which it is hung.

The relationship between fullness and emptiness, between presence and absence, performs something in these early works that will later become a constant feature: the “corporalization” of painting.

IC

May 2010