Days of Dark and Light

'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.