[open the box] Julião Sarmento

At the beginning of the nineties Julião Sarmento’s work went through a great transformation after the exhibition Dias de escuro e de luz, that he held at the Galeria Luís Serpa in Lisbon. The profuse violence of his works in the eighties gave way to large white fields on which female characters move, perform mysterious acts, manipulate sharp objects and hide. The paintings are covered in a white layer which is the support for the visible marks of all the states of those drawings on which they appeared or disappeared. The white canvases (as they are known) are palimpsests of those gestures that are like the marks of time, like memories that remain of women who stage their domesticity, who offer themselves up.

None of them has her identity violated by her face being exposed. Indeed, they are not one woman or another, but examples of an incessant search through the cartography of desire, the violence of the space between them and the furniture, them and the bowls, or the feet, the hands, the tables, the knives, the (sometimes amputated) fingers, the sex, only alluded to.

Thus Julião Sarmento’s painting contains a lexicon of repeated images – and the repetitive, obsessive character is an essential factor in the tension that his canvases hold and which go in fibrillation, like a halo or a sound – a buzzing, for example – to the spectator.

We are fixed in our condition as voyeurs, caught in the web of what is given to us to see, and left inevitably alone in front of the screen into which the canvas has been turned, waiting for our projection.

Biography
Julião Sarmento (Lisbon, 1948) studied Painting and Architecture at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa, between 1967 and 1974. He has lectured at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu (Japan, 1997) and at the Munich Akademie der Bildenen Künste (1988-1989). He has exhibited his work since 1972, with special note for his participation at the Kassel Documenta (1982 and 1987), at the Venice Biennial in 1997 representing Portugal, solos at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC, 1999), as well as participating in the São Paulo Biennial (2002). His work is represented in many museums and private collections in Portugal and abroad: Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Fundação de Serralves (Oporto), Fundació “la Caixa” (Madrid), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), among others.

Bibliography
Celant, Germano, e Melo, Alexandre, Julião Sarmento, Milano, Electa, 1997.
Neri, Louise (ed.), Julião Sarmento, Barcelona, Ediciones Polígrafa, 2003.