Press release
JULIÃO SARMENTO
2.11.2024 – 25.1.2025
opening 2 November 2024
Three years after the On Goya exhibition, Giorgio Persano returns to present the works of Julião Sarmento, one of the most noted Portuguese artists on the international scene and with whom the gallery has collaborated since the late 1980s.
In the paintings selected for the exhibition, faceless female figures against chalky white backgrounds laden with pictorial matter stage a reflection on the body and desire. Between intimacy and alienation, these grey silhouettes respond to the artist’s need to create archetypes, silhouettes not specified as persons: ‘For me an eye is already someone, a face always corresponds to a person. They are unidentified women, not deprived of something.’
These presences suggest a sense of proximity but also of extraneousness, as if entering the private sphere of a subject without fully connecting with it. ‘Julião Sarmento’s narrative unfolds through the art of absence, an idea of breathtaking suspension. (…) These are fragments and details of an image that evaporates into the silence of clotted matter, the pretext for a narrative which configures itself as an “other place”: the outlines and glimmers of a figure that shows itself through recognizable details and conveys the essence of its volume in a whisper.’ Danilo Eccher
In an almost dreamlike dimension, unexpected textual elements also appear on the canvases but escape easy comprehension. Drawing, graphic and literary elements thus intertwine to create visual paths, made of references and allusions that accumulate and become, in the Portuguese tradition, choral narratives. As Sérgio Mah points out, collage tends to be ‘contradictory and hard to interpret’, with ‘meanings that are suggested rather than stated’, but it is precisely in this dimension that the essence of paradox is expressed, where ‘the connection between the various parts is essentially the result of tension, on the verge of the missing relationship, and that its comprehensibility is an inexorable and infinite theme multiplied in its innumerable secrets.’
Three years after his death, the gallery remembers Julião Sarmento, whose value lies not only in his exceptional work, but also in his role as a promoter of cultural and artistic dialogue between his country and the rest of the world.
Artworks of exhibitions
