Julião Sarmento

Faces, 1976, one of the first works on view in Julião Sarmento’s latest exhibition, consists of a voyeuristic close-up of two girls kissing. This early video highlights a motif that has defined the artist’s oeuvre since the 1970s: the representation of the female body as an expression of the physical and psychological dimensions of desire. In the main gallery, the painting Heavy Load, 2009, portrays one of Sarmento’s trademark headless figures that convey fragmented themes culled from his personal life and popular culture (particularly film and literature). With her arms intertwined behind her back, the character emerges from a signature-style white background. Below are silk-screened images of the cover of James Salter’s 1968 book A Sport and a Pastime, a novel that evokes eroticism and idealism––two topics that often inspire Sarmento.

A similar method is apparent in other works, such as Brunelleschi’s Doubt, 2009. Here, two uncanny characters face each other on the right side of the work, as if engaged in a silent conversation. On the left, the iconic album art of Sonic Youth’s 1988 Daydream Nation (featuring Gerhard Richter’s Kerze, 1982) is replicated three times, each with enigmatically less and less detail. The reference to Brunelleschi, a famous Italian Renaissance architect, connects these paintings to the set of mixed-media works on paper presented in an adjacent small room. In Woman, House, Bordeaux and White, 2009, Sarmento includes an architectural element—the facade of a house—with the typical iconographic elements found throughout his paintings. As on previous occasions, Sarmento’s new output offers glimpses of imaginary stories; however, by allowing emotion to take center stage, in this exhibition he further develops an exceptional fusion of conceptualism and romanticism.