Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, all the infinite space of painting

Special envoy to Marseille

Slender, brunette with a wise bun, her entire silhouette engulfed in the blackness of her outfit, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva is nothing more than a clear face from which emerge a cavernous gaze, a frank will and a half-smile. of victory. And white hands, posed as an offering like a treasure. Hoisted on a high stool, she poses in front of one of her large milky paintings where space dissolves, in the rue de l’Abbé-Carton studio in Paris. “I don’t know what life is like outside of painting… I’ve meditated on painting so much, all my life, since I was little. I don’t know how to do anything else”confided, in 1987 to France Culture, the great Portuguese painter, who has become one of the beacons of the School of Paris.

Born in Lisbon on June 13, 1908 in a cultured environment, she died in Paris on March 6, 1992 as a French glory. This concentrated artist had come to study in Paris in 1928, at La Grande Chaumière with the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle…