Exhibitions
Inhabited Designs: The Silent Dialogue Between Helena Almeida and Chema Madoz
In the city of Toulouse, the Galerie le Château d'Eau is hosting the exhibition Helena Almeida | Chema Madoz. Inhabited Designs , a show that will be open until August 23 and invites visitors to step behind the scenes of artistic creation. More than a display of finished works, the project focuses on what usually remains hidden: the sketches, the nascent ideas, and the objects in transformation.
The exhibition articulates an unexpected dialogue between two fundamental figures in contemporary photography: Helena Almeida and Chema Madoz. Although their trajectories and aesthetics differ profoundly, the project reveals an essential affinity: both understand the image as a space for mental construction rather than as a mere representation of the world.
The exhibition brings together drawings, notebooks, altered objects, and preparatory materials that are rarely exhibited. In this intimate space, photography emerges as the final consequence of a prior, almost always unspoken, visual process.
The title Inhabited Designs revisits a key idea in the work of Helena Almeida, linked to her series Inhabited Drawing . The concept of 'design' is understood here in its broadest sense, close to the Renaissance: drawing, project, and mental process converge in a single creative action.
Far from being mere preparatory exercises, the sketches acquire aesthetic autonomy. They function as traces of thought, fragments where the idea still breathes without being fully resolved.
In Almeida's case, the body and the image intertwine in a constant investigation of presence, theatricality, and trace. His interventions—sometimes barely perceptible through brushstrokes or lines—introduce a physical dimension that blurs the boundary between photography and performance.
Meanwhile, Chema Madoz's work unfolds from a poetic laboratory logic. His personal notebooks, displayed in this exhibition alongside handcrafted objects, reveal the origin of a visual universe where the everyday is given new meaning. A clock, a rope, or a ladder are transformed into devices for thought, imbued with irony and ambiguity.
One of the central themes of the exhibition is the affirmation of the creative process as an essential part of the artwork. For both artists, the sketch is not simply a preliminary step, but an autonomous space where the idea is tested, contradicted, or abandoned.
In Madoz's work, this logic culminates in images of strong formal refinement, where black and white eliminates any distraction and focuses attention on the idea. Each photograph functions as an almost sculptural construction, where nothing is superfluous.
His work also engages with a sensibility close to surrealism: unexpected associations and visual paradoxes generate a poetics of bewilderment, open to multiple interpretations.
The project has been curated by Pepe Font de Mora, who proposes a cross-reading of the two artists' work based on their historical connection to the Foto Colectania collection. The exhibition thus underscores not only their stylistic differences, but also a shared sensibility towards the intimate, the processual, and the unfinished.
Inhabited Designs does not seek to explain the work of Almeida and Madoz, but rather to approach the moment before its materialization. That moment in which the idea is still fragile, mutable, and open.
By bringing together these previously unseen materials, the exhibition proposes a broader reflection on artistic creation: not as a result, but as a continuous process of translation between the imagined and the visible.
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