Who is the contemporary Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento?
“I don’t make art about art. That's not what interests me. It's anything about me that is art. It's a physical practice, almost physical because I make objects that can be seen and in some cases touched. I make art that has to do with seduction practices.” Julião Sarmento, 1992 (interview conducted by Alexandre Melo).
The Fundamental Figure of Contemporary Art in Portugal
Julião Sarmento, one of the most recognized contemporary Portuguese artists, passed away on the morning of Tuesday, May 4th, leaving a notorious and emblematic work punctuated by experimentation with all means or techniques. Over the last five decades, the multidisciplinary work of the Portuguese artist has addressed themes such as eroticism, sexuality, literature and cinema. At the same time, he questioned the concepts of desire, absence, time and language through different media (painting, drawing, sculpture, collages, installation, video, photography and performance). Born in Lisbon in 1948, Julião Manuel Tavares Sena Sarmento began his career in 1968, at the National Society of Fine Arts exhibition. In the following decade, he won recognition among the Portuguese public; From 1990 onwards, he consolidated his international career, when doing so seemed like a pipe dream. Far from presenting an exhaustive constitution of his works, this article highlights the lines of research and creation that Julião Sarmento explored obsessively throughout his extensive career.
The first decade of his long artistic career
The artistic discourse of Julião Sarmento travels over the decades around certain elements such as the body, sensuality, the notion of time, literary quotations and original texts, the fragmentation of forms, eroticism and voyeurism, regardless of the means used. At the beginning of his career, in the 1970s, there is a set of pieces that were produced by means of expression resulting from the revolution in technical and conceptual languages at the time that enunciate the principles of his future works. Therefore, he begins by introducing various means such as verbal language into his works due to his interest in literature and the influence of conceptual art.
Variable part - 5 participants, from 1976, offers the viewer two possible readings — visual and written — through three elements: photography, text and drawing, forming an almost primary game. Starting from the first photograph in a practically performative staging of the body, Julião Sarmento asks an external participant to describe this photograph in a text. Then, another participant draws a representation, based on the reading of this text, and so on, until obtaining a bifurcation of meanings and an ambiguity of communication systems. This piece about the deconstruction of representation was present at the relevant exhibition «Alternativa Zero».
Variable part - 5 participants in Julião Sarmento, 1976 - Serralves Collection
In this decade of intense production he created in different media such as photography - Memory Piece (Two Friends) 1976, Untitled (Bataille) 1976 and Quatre Mouvements de la Peur 1978 — film, — Legs 1975 and Faces 1976 — or combining different techniques — as in Secrets of the Animal World, a series of works that had a sense of animality, in which he mixed people with animals.
The White Paintings Cycle
At the end of the 1970s, there was an exhaustion of conceptual languages; consequently, artists return to painting. Thus, in the following decade, Julião Sarmento created paintings with several panels, giving a singular unity to a set through the fragmentation of elements in juxtaposition. These works were exhibited in various cultural spaces such as Galeria Cómicos, in Lisbon, Galleria Marilena Bonono, in Bari, and Modulo, in Porto. However, with the move to the United States of America, this association of disparate universes begins to overlap into the same image. An example of this is the work «Noite Americana», from 1989.
American Night in Julião Sarmento, 1989 - Serralves Collection
Later, the cycle of White Paintings appeared, canvases with an absence of color defined by graphite lines, practically drawings on canvas. The titles are not illustrative of his paintings, but they complete the work itself, as if they were the last brushstroke. Unlike the previous decade, which consisted of several panels, Wasting My Time With You #928, from 1994, the artist creates a work with just two panels, using his two favorite colors at the time: on the right side, white; on the other, black. According to the artist, two figures are represented on the white canvas, a man pulling his pants when he feels they are tight and an elbow next to an edge, both carrying an unpleasant situation. Aggression and unpredictable moments are recurrently present in his work with sharp elements such as knives. On the left side, of lower proportions, a white fence cut in half by the black background is visible. The figures represented in this work are frequent throughout the artist's career, in the different series, as there is a coherence and “migration” of thoughts and ideas.
Wasting My Time With You #928 in Julião Sarmento, 1994 - Berardo Collection Museum
In 1997, Julião Sarmento represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale, designing for the spaces of Palazzo Vendramin ai Carmini (Portuguese Pavilion) a set of paintings that extend the cycle of White Paintings, which began in 1990.
In addition to the white paintings, Julião Sarmento created in other media in this decade. An example of this is the installation Siege Two, from 1993, which reflects the conditions of women based on a relationship between incarcerated bodies. This work materializes the irrationality of how women are represented, bringing a relationship of power and submission and an anthropology of animal behavior with an animalization of human beings.
Siege Two in Julião Sarmento, 1993
Career consolidation in the new century
In the first decade of the new century, the artist returned to media already explored in the 1970s, such as video, photography and installation, although without abandoning painting. Anchored in a discourse around the body, the feminine, sensuality and the questioning of the concepts of desire, absence, time and language, he created works such as the installation Cure in Anozero — Coimbra Contemporary Art Biennial, a series of photographs titled by American Landscape and multiple videos like Parasite 2003, Voyeur 2007 and The end of the world 2015.
American Landscape 6 in Julião Sarmento, 2004
Between 1967 and 2005, the artist produced more than fifty videos, driven by his passion for cinema and artists such as Andy Warhol, which were a reference for his super 8mm films, where he creates an interaction with a great intensity of movements between the body and the camera, in a game of seduction and desire. The artist detailed the process in an interview with Umbigo magazine:
“Deep down, the camera was almost an extension of my own body. It worked like my look at the body, like an interaction of my own look that was filtered by the camera. I was almost like the Japanese (I'll make the comparison) who go to visit great historical monuments and never see them, except when they arrive in Japan. They always have an abstract view of things, because they already get off the bus with a machine in hand. ”
Faces in Julião Sarmento 1976, Super 8 film, color, without sound, 44' 22'' - Van Abbemuseum Collection, Eindhoven
With a career consolidated nationally and internationally, his collection of works of art can be found in numerous institutions, from the Tate Modern, in London, to the Guggenheim, in New York. In 2002 he represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial and, in 2012, the Serralves Museum organized the artist's first retrospective exhibition, White Nights. In 2020, he launched the book Café Bissau, in which he presented photographs of his own taken between 1964 and 2017.
During this long journey, Julião Sarmento He became one of the central figures of contemporary art, following the artistic currents that dominated yet maintaining his internal coherence. For eternity, the Portuguese artist left us his artistic heritage, fundamental to the history of art in Portugal.