Le Marais

DIVING INTO THE SCREEN
One imagines her frail in the enormous house in the Rua da Emenda. One cannot help thinking that this house, with its beautiful sweeping staircase, around which the house itself was designed, was fundamental for that particular sensitivity that Maria Helena Vieira da Silva always had. There are paintings that almost tell the story of that extraordinary spatial perception, that remarkable talent for understanding the poetics of space.
In 1939, after Portuguese nationality had not been granted to her husband, the painter Arpad Szenes, the couple decided to go to Rio de Janeiro for the duration of the war, where they remained until 1947. During those years Vieira da Silva changed the nature of Brazilian art, in the sense that her approach to space, which had been greatly influenced by Joaquín Torres-Garcia (and, perhaps, by the staircase in the Rua da Emenda), would become a fundamental pole for the later development of Brazilian neo-concretism, which then became dominant in the following decade.
It was perhaps during this period that Vieira da Silva’s work defined its determining parameters for the future: the definition of a grid that constructs spaces, meshes of lines that propose vanishing points for the gaze, cages, bedrooms, chambers that propose the sinking of the gaze – which, indeed, had been foreseen in 1934, with a painting with an unequivocal name, Atelier, Lisbonne, dating from the same year.
After this research Vieira da Silva became a constructor of spaces defined on the order of the optical plane; that is from the theatricalisation of perspective, which had been the centre of the painting since Masaccio until its staging as modernist reflexivity.
In any case, we Portuguese like to see her as a homebased painter, painted tiles and libraries, loneliness and ostracisms, exiles and self-absorptions. All this may be true, but it isn’t. It is much more: in the sharpness of the depth of the gaze it proposes, in the sinking within the painting and in the Joycean complexity of the crossed levels of narrative there is a universal quality that sets her as one of relevant artists of Europe (and Brazil) of the inter-war period – and of after World War II. Because very few people achieved what she did in transposing the issue of the representation of space to the three-dimensional, the shattered or multiplied, diving into the screen, before one’s eyes. She is frail and mysterious, down there in the Rua da Emenda, her gaze permanently flirting with the painting proposals of a good part of the last century: how can I believe in an image that is not verisimilar, but that stands as a dive into a different place?

Delfim Sardo