Study for Inner Improvement 1977

Helena Almeida made this photograph with paint sometime in her career, and it's a trip. What grabs me is that big smear of blue. It’s like she’s trying to paint herself out, or maybe in, to a new reality. You can almost feel the drag of the bristles across the surface, that electric blue both concealing and revealing at the same time. It’s a simple gesture, but it carries so much weight. There’s something performative about it. The way she holds the brush, the look in her eye, it’s like she's daring us to see both the act of painting and the person behind the paint. It reminds me a bit of Yves Klein, his use of that intense blue, but here it’s more intimate, more about the body, more about the push and pull of identity. Art, for Almeida, wasn’t just about making something pretty, but about exploring the messy, complicated stuff of being human.