Black and white in common

In 2022, for the 20th anniversary of the Foundation, its director Pepe Font de Mora explored the resonances between their works. Some time later, Magali Blénet, director of the Château d’eau, invited him to present this unexpected connection for the 2nd exhibition of the Toulouse institution after its reopening at the end of 2025. Unexpected, because their photographs have nothing to do with each other, at least a priori, except the choice of black and white.

For almost fifty years, the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida expressed “states of being” through the presentation of her own body. First with painting then, from 1969 with photography and video. The Spanish photographer Chema Madoz, for his part, has devoted himself solely to objects since the beginning of the 1990s. The fact remains that their photographs share two points in common: a creative process which involves drawing and an inhabited photograph, the incarnation of the mental image that they have in mind, which is highlighted by the exhibition, which is particularly successful in the choice of pieces and the clear and refined scenography.

Helena Almeida’s photographs, sometimes enhanced with a line of pencil or paint, and the preparatory drawings for these productions interact on the walls. For Chema Madoz, the drawings, sketches of the objects, which he has made or makes himself, and their staging, are placed in display cases with the objects (mask, knife, book within the book, etc.) that we find in his photographs. A sentence from Chema Madoz placed in the spotlight recalls their reason for being: “It’s not the objects themselves that motivate me, but the relationship we establish with them. I am interested in the notion of play as one of the most primary forms of learning. »