Julião Sarmento
Easy Pairings Fractals Stars
Julião Sarmento, one of Portugal’s leading contemporary artists, is exhibiting at Galerie Templon in Brussels for the first time. His works are subtle and enigmatic, exploring the mechanisms of desire and of representation.
Sarmento will be showing Fourth Easy Piece, an original in-situ installation that reinterprets Degas’ famous Petite danseuse de quatorze ans. The dancer has become a woman, her naked body, sculpted and smooth, a 3-D print. She turns her back on the works hanging behind her from a rail, a ‘small panorama of what we might term a plastic autobiography’ (Jacinto Lageira). The entire show places us, once again, face-to-face with Julião Sarmento’s obsessions: fragmentation; the gap between fiction and reality; references to Degas and Marcel Duchamps; latent eroticism.
As suggested by the exhibition title Easy Pairings Fractals Stars, Sarmento is a big fan of mysterious combinations. His paintings and works on paper feature juxtapositions of recurrent themes: a faceless female archetype, lines that are plant-like or geometrical, and references to literature and architecture. A window opened onto narratives and relationships, Julião Sarmento’s work invites the viewer to give free reign to her or his imagination and the voyeuristic pleasures of the fragmented glimpse.
Three Frames (grey grey)
The artist
Julião Sarmento was born in 1948 in Lisbon, Portugal, and died in 2021. The artist explored the terrain of desire and representation in an approach combining painting, video and sound and visual installations. He exploited a huge variety of combinations to create a series of works with recurring motifs: an archetypal woman, modernist architectural images, plant-like lines, references to literature and the cinema. A large part of his work addressed issues of fragmentation, the gap between real and fictional, and latent eroticism.
