JULIÃO SARMENTO – Nothing can be predicted by means of it.

Press Release

“Nothing can be predicted by means of it.”

One of the most relevant artists of his generation, Julião Sarmento travels between the practice of painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video, using the different media, not as an investigation in itself, but simply as tools to best suit his attempt to sustain a very unique practice characterized by a concise visual vocabulary that explores themes of memory, transgression, seduction and desire based upon a particular gaze. The Remarks on Colour series derives from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical notes with the same title and expands Julião Sarmento’s ongoing dissection of the mechanisms of looking to examine our sensory perception of colour. Taking, as a starting point, the work by Ludwig Wittgenstein, where he presents his reaction to Goethe’s Theory of Colour through the form of fragmented notes as an attempt to clarify the use of language in the field of colour, Sarmento combines, in his works on paper (here presented), a range group of seemingly unrelated images and forms. Using silk-screened views of modernist houses, flowers or objects, mixed with small drawings or signs, combined with fragmented photographs of different origins, all articulated with one of Wittgenstein’s fragmented philosophical notes taped directly to the surfaces, he produces a solid body of work that underlines his usual rich and complex universe of references. Migrating a system of free-floating signifiers between his works (notable recurring motifs such as parts of bodies, architectural schemes or plans, geometrical signs, language or hand gestures), Sarmento generates a free-play of unsettling associations that refuses to settle into meaning. Somehow artificial and deliberately constructed it results in an exercise of meticulous editing in which the assemblage of disjunctive elements resists coherent narrative leaving the viewer, simultaneously connected and with a particularly familiar sense of disorientation.

Ana Anacleto
February 2012