Dias de escuro e de luz - II (jarro)

"'Dias de escuro e de luz' [Days of Dark and Light] is the first series of a larger body of works that, under the general title of ‘Pinturas brancas’ [White Paintings], Julião Sarmento produced during the 1990s. This painting depicts a female figure slightly parting one of the black dresses that are emblematic of the artist’s iconography. On the left, she is accompanied by her double (shadow or spectre), and on the right, by a roundish geometric shape and an arum lily, a flower with clear phallic connotations. The sober incisive drawing, associated with the neutrality of the white background, manifests Sarmento’s intention of eliminating the descriptive and impacting effect of colour in order to obtain ‘the simplest forms with the maximum effect. (...) I tried to eliminate all points of attraction, because I was not interested in them. I wanted one’s eyesight to be caught only by the essence of what was there. And what was there was the simplest form possible that would translate and transmit the idea that I wanted’.
Shown for the first time at Galeria Pedro Oliveira, in Porto, the series 'Dias de escuro e de luz' reveals a pictorial shift in Sarmento’s work, in which an exuberance of form and an expressive saturation of colour, the hallmarks of his production of the 1980s, give way to formal restraint and tonal sobriety. Overlapping layers of different kinds of white pigment, mixed with earth and other materials, create a surface that the artist considers a ‘memory of the skin’ and upon which are inscribed graphite drawings that function as scars, reminiscent of the experiences lived by the body.
The title of this new series echoes changes that occurred at the technical level but also the artist’s ongoing interest in the semantic indeterminacy of images. His works can never be explained by themselves; by representing actions that are about to happen or, on the contrary, just happened, they always contain a latent ambiguity, therefore opening to different meanings depending on the viewer observing them. The skin, as a zone of sensorial contact between conscious surface and the depth of the real, is of great relevance to Sarmento’s incursions into the territories of desire. It appears in the guise of animal fur, in close-ups of the human body captured by the camera and in the titles of some works. The impossibility of attaining the deepest regions where the meaning of things is formed is revealed in the exploration of suspended, fragmented narratives, that translate into the sequential logic of the artist’s post-conceptual, photography-based works of the 1970s, in the various scene paintings of his 1980s collages, in the symbolic investment of the sparse figures that came to occupy his subsequent painting and also in the sculptural installations and the films and videos produced throughout his career.
The protagonist par excellence of Sarmento’s works is an archetypal woman, almost always faceless and surrounded with referents of spatial enclosures (architectural plans without entry or exit points, stairs and paths that lead nowhere) and objects (daggers, tables or flowers) that convey small disturbing stories around actions such as stalking, attacking, fleeing or falling. Sarmento seeks to represent the often voyeuristic, narcissist and transgressive, instinctive nature of the gestures of seduction. References from cinema and literature, with direct allusions to famous authors and characters, such as Raymond Carver or Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, stem from a deep interest in visual and symbolic resources that permit the transformation of moods into gestures and things with physical substance."