This work plays with the wooden stretcher bars of the structures that form the support on which the canvas is stretched. This structure is usually invisible to the viewer, but here exposed through the use of a semitransparent cloth, which reveals the contours of the artist’s body as she tries to “impress” herself or “penetrate” through that membrane.

 

Helena Almeida interprets thus a relationship between inside and outside, either as the interior projected as a body in relation to outside space, or through a constant assertion of the delimitation of spaces and the desire to overtake them, tear them apart, reveal their other side, to break down their barriers and pull out of them. She fulfills thus in another way the timeless axiom always repeated by the old master of Velasquez, Francisco Pacheco: “The image must jump out of the canvas”.

 

This photograph belongs to a series of works from the same period in which Almeida became conscious that it wasn’t enough to dismantle and deconstruct the support of painting, but that one had to fight as well the externality and, in some way, the tyranny of painting. A fight against the distance that exists in painting between being and representation, against the tyranny of the painter’s absent body in a life spent representing other bodies, against the danger of falling into yet another trap, that of self-portraiture. In her case we are not presented with self-portraits, but rather with self-representations.

 

 

IC

May 2010