Julião Sarmento: Abstracto, Branco, Tóxico e Volátil
During my two visits to the Berardo Colecao, I happened to see this huge, retrospective of Sarmento's work and it was too iconic to not leave some traces...
“Julião Sarmento was born in Lisbon on 4 May 1948. He attended the Architecture and Painting courses at ESBAL (Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts) between 1967 and 1974. He was one of the most internationally recognised Portuguese artists, having developed an artistic career that was immensely coherent, rich, and intense. Constantly renewing himself and closely connected with the artistic practices of his day, from post-pop to the present, he employed a diverse range of methods and techniques, including photography, painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, performance, and film, to establish a concise vocabulary of ambiguous images.
The artist was strongly influenced by the culture of English-speaking countries and the themes and images of literature and film, which frequently appear in his works in the form of quotes and montages. His work has a performative and theatrical dimension, which accumulates through the constant evocation of timeless themes and representations-such as women, sexuality, transgression, memory, duality, home, the word — which operate as structural axes of his work…Bringing together a significant set of works that marked his career and whose selection is the fruit of a close collaboration between the artist and the exhibition curator Catherine David, Abstracto, Branco, Tóxico e Volatil (also the title of one of his works from 1997) is the first major exhibition of Julião Sarmento since his death.
This was a project which Sarmento fought to realise with extraordinary commitment, with the exhibition layout and the arrangement of the works in the rooms finalised a mere two months prior to his passing. For Julião, the installation of his works in space was an integral part of what he exhibited, since he considered the relationship established between the work, the space that surrounds it, and the spectator to be of vital importance.
Abstracto, Branco, Tóxico e Volatil is an exhibition in which Julião feels very present and in which we are moved not only by the sensuality of his textures and the complexity of his compositions, but also by the enormous plastic and theoretical sophistication of these enigmatic, delicate, perverse images.
His works present no conclusions, theses, or hypotheses. They do not ask questions nor give answers; rather, they propose that we enter into their game between concealment and revelation, and that we construct our own stories."
(from the exhibition text)
"I don't think I would have been able to do what I did without the memory of my life, or without the memory of the history of art, so far as that is concerned... In reality, I see my work as an accumulation of different information. It has always been that way. What I do today is part of what I did yesterday, what I did 20 years ago and what I'll do again tomorrow." "There are no facts, only interpretations."
- Sarmento
Salto (Sarmento, 1985-86)
mixed media on canvas
why i cared: composition and textures 15/10
Guibert (Sarmento, 2007-08)
why i cared: reminded me of (¬‿¬
Drift (Julião Sarmento, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, 2004)
projections in loop, panoramic 360º screen
""Drift" was the title suggested by Baldessari: it is related to the spectator's position, to flow and movement, to art and life, to the possibility of each to choose what to and not to see. The three artists worked on this theme in a relaxed, easy manner, and the ideas flowed freely around the concepts of the horizon and peripheral vision, which were explored by each artist according to their own interests."
why i cared: 1. the chairs rotate wheeee + 2. just the size of this installation kicked something inside me to imagine bigger things for my work (when appropriate ofc lol) but just to start thinking bigger ╰( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆*:
I Love You Too Much (Sarmento, 2006)
both titled the same
why i cared: removal/exclusion of identity along w being physically bound should freak me out but these works didn't do that. maybe its the little security camera in the back but I don't know what made me think of this as safety. maybe its just some strange patriarchal sense of safety drilled into my head
Abstracto, Branco, Tóxico e Volátil (Sarmento, 1997)
why i cared: roll credits
can't remember the name of this one, sorry!!!
why i cared: I DONT KNOWWW?!!! these were so weird. they got under my skin almost immediately. AGAIN its possible i was left w an impression because they made me think of pain and a woman's body. but genuinely this drawing on the right is literally what i imagine wanting to do every 3.5 weeks of my life. it's an incredibly internal thing that i have to hide so its quite something that this man's work is making me expose these thoughts now. which brings me to thinking about art and it's audiences. what makes a "good" provocative piece of art that doesn't also exploit women and violence? i mean, is this perverted? is my reaction of liking it inappropriate?
suck my tongue (Sarmento, 2006)
why i cared: the text