Helena Almeida
Desenho, 1999
(Drawing)

Body and painting, or photography and body, can be understood (or desired) interchangeably as means to work on or work with, led by the sheer impulse of seeing them turned into a work of art. The traditional relationship between artist and model, or between pictorial representation and bodily presence, spans the history of art as a prominent thread that stitches and, at the same time, draws a path of ongoing rupture. With the emergence of performance art in the late 1960s of the twentieth century, the body is a work, but also a means: a process that needs time and space to be acknowledged; a fleeting work that draws on different registers to become a piece. In the case of Helena Almeida (Lisbon, Portugal, 1934 – Sintra, Portugal, 2018), painting takes on her own body and vice versa, whereas this act "becomes a kind of Eucharist. It is as if I had swallowed it all. [...] Why did I end up with painting? I actually did not, I am actually a painter, right? However, I became the painting, I became my work, I became the creation. At the same time, I am the creator. I cannot say why." The transformation the artist inflicts on her work at the end of the 1960s is crucial, in some respects even radical, but it is unintentional. It was born out of a need to converse with the pictorial essence based on her own body, thus completing the transformation of understanding art as a representation of reality and subsequently building a new reality.
In the 1970s, H. Almeida produced a series of works generically called Pintura habitada (Inhabited Painting). These derived from an earlier approach, where the canvas becomes a curtain that falls, revealing the frame, or opens like a window (1968). The works by Lucio Fontana that were exhibited at the 1966 Biennale di Venezia were a key influence in "breaking away" from a type of pictorial representation subject to the rectangle of the canvas. The later inhabited paintings invoke at least a couple of recurring ruptures: black and white photography, where the artist's body and actions are shown as sequential scenes, as well as traces of blue paint that act as a symbol of the pictorial means that would like to override or, if not, at least, oversize itself with regard to the actual artist, which the artist hampers. In a work from 1974, made up of six elements, the artist appears painting an invisible canvas on an easel, in a painter's typical gesture and attitude.
The blue stain evolves freely without the constraints of the canvas in the first three scenes, whereas she does not even need the easel in the last three. This work-sequence is reminiscent of Franz Kafka's short story The Wish to be a Red Indian. In another one from 1976, also consisting of six elements, we see the artist gradually covering the photograph's space in blue, until she disappears behind the painting as if it were a screen that wanted to cancel her out.
However, the artist grasps her like an object and pushes her aside just enough to appear behind it, while taking a sneaky peek at the camera. In Estudio para um enriquecimento interior (Study for Inner Enrichment), dressed in a painter's smock and holding a brush, she paints a blue spot in space, which she then takes in her hand and puts in her smock's pocket. The painting is still there, it continues to enrich the inner life, but it can no longer explain by itself what Almeida needs to externalise: the importance of the body as joint presence, support and work.
The work Desenho is a natural evolution of the inhabited drawings, as followers of the inhabited paintings. In all the drawings, the artist's action is to draw lines, instead of painting stains. Using parts of her body, especially her hands and arms, as a support, where a drawn line is mistaken for a real photographed thread, thus creating situations where our understanding is altered, and the body once again takes on the role of medium and support. In this drawing, the artist's right arm is stretched out on the floor of her studio (i.e. her space and habitat), while a line of black pigment runs along her limb and continues on the floor, hence creating a poetic image that encompasses both the distancing and presence of the self.

References
Helena Almeida, IAC-Ministério da Cultura, Lisbon / Electa, Milan, 1998.
Helena Almeida: pés no chão, cabeça no céu / feet on the ground, head in the sky, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 2003.
Helena Almeida: corpus, IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia, 2017.