Saldanha had carpentry skills, having made some of her uncluttered furniture and frames. It was from a slat used for her frames that the artist created Slat in 1967. That year she wrote: “One day I had the urge to eliminate frames and canvases, to get out of the rectangle. I was only interested in colour verticals. And above all to keep to a minimum: a small slat and a slat against the wall, resting on the floor, eliminating the skirting board.” Slat is thus a minimal and radical painting: if a painting is often made up of a wooden stretcher and a piece of fabric, Slat is a single long, slender piece of wood, without cloth, linen, canvas or nails. Leaning against the wall, it also becomes an object, with its existence in space, thus questioning the traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture. What the artist achieves is the autonomy of the frame, which becomes a medium for the painting, a painted three-dimensional object. The extreme simplicity of Slat did not prevent Saldanha from developing an exceptional and complex painting oeuvre, using its rich, subtle and seductive variations and combinations of colours and brushstrokes. “I painted for eight months, each day a Slat, and I went on filling the house.” Period photos show the artist in her studio surrounded by a multitude of them. The stripped-down nature of the medium enables the works to be rearranged, with infinite possibilities of composition and rhythm.

— Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, MASP, 2023