Chema Madoz & Helena Almeida

They have never met, but their notebooks cross paths today at the Water Tower. For its second program since its reopening at the end of 2025, the Toulouse institution has partnered with the Fundació Foto Colectania and its former director, Pepe Font de Mora, to orchestrate a dialogue between the Portuguese Helena Almeida (1934-2018) and the Spanish Chema Madoz (born in 1958), two giants of the Iberian Peninsula united by a rarely seen gesture: the sketch.

The title — Diseños habitados inhabited drawings — borrows from Almeida the name of a seminal series, the one in which she first shifted from painting to photography in the mid-1970s. It also borrows from the vocabulary of the Renaissance: the disegno then designated both the drawing traced and the mental project that precedes it. This is precisely what the exhibition makes visible. For the first time, Madoz's personal notebooks are leaving their private sphere to be exhibited alongside Almeida's sketches for her series O perdão.

Everything opposes them and everything unites them. Almeida drew with her own body, which she photographed in black and white before reworking it with a brush or pencil, directly onto the print: "My work is my body, my body is my work." “Madoz, for his part, patiently creates objects from his sketches, then photographs them in a clinical light, inherited from Surrealism and visual poetry. She breaks the formal limits of the painting; he plays with the boundaries of appearance and reality. But both go through the same initial gesture—pencil, paper, idea—to transform thought into image.

Around the exhibition: The Fundació Foto Colectania, a partner of the exhibition, has been one of Barcelona’s leading institutions for Iberian photography since 2002.” Its collection comprises more than 3,000 works by eighty Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese artists. Almeida and Madoz were among the very first artists to contribute to its collection.

1
Water Tower, Toulouse
From April 15 to August 23, 2026
1 Place Laganne, 31300 Toulouse
2