Julião Sarmento. Photo: Paulo Pires.
IT COULD BE SAID that Julião Sarmento’s major theme was desire. In his work, we are repeatedly faced with opposing points of view subject and object, voyeurism and blindness, dream and reality that repudiate the male gaze by undoing the rote equivalencies between possession and existence. The Lisbon-born artist’s evocations of bodies, often partially or completely erased, demonstrate nothing so much as the impossibility of reaching a final representation of anything; his unsettled forms cling to the illusion, nearly disintegrated today, of an unattainable, secret image.
Beginning in the 1960s, Sarmento constructed an art that combined conceptual and thematic coherence with fluency both in a wide range of media (painting, film, installation, performance, sculpture, architecture) and in methods of production; his practice embraced active participation and dialogue with successive generations and cultural contexts. The consistency of his lan