Julião Sarmento

Edition Staatsgalerie Modern Kunst, München.

The drawing Fever relates to the series known as “White Paintings” that Julião Sarmento developed throughout the 1990’s. As in other Works from this series, the tracing appears unfinished. It does not describe shapes; it suggests situations, with na extraordinary restraint of means. The lines are organised as if barely touching the paper’s white surface, minimal elements of visual information, fragments of a scene recorded by the arttists’smemory. The bodies, guessed at rather than observed, possess no concrete substance. Space is undefined, without qualifying coordinates or objects. The framing merely renders the detail of an apparent movement of two protagonists apparent: a faceless one that we discover in the foreground thanks to the gesture of the hands held together by their fingertips. That figure – also identified by the curve that vaguely suggests the line of a shoulder – appears to be separated, in an ambiguous attitude that may suggested a distanced thoughtfulness or a meditative retreat. On the right, a second figure: with partially hidden facial features, of which we recognize the half-closed eyes. This last (feminine) figure appears to kiss or hold the shoulder of the first (male?) figure. The remaining actions is hidden away from the viewer’s eye, but the suggestion brought forth by the unfinished aspect of the image is that of affective tension or mismatch, a divergence or distancing, as if human relations ended up shipwrecked in the white sickness of solitude.

AFC

November 2011