An Involved Story pursues the concept of the visual image as the locus for the construction of a narrative fiction, whether suspended or incomplete, a concept that can be seen as one of the founding characteristics of Julião Sarmento’s work. The flow of signals or of partially occult or unfinished elided iconographic elements comes together to subtract the figures from a context of clear or transparent meanings, in spite of the paradox of luminosity that the “white paintings” cycle in particular – to which the present work belongs – appears as a constant quality.

White thus dominates as uncentred space and light, horizon, a lasure-based variegated white, given a texture by the grains and dust that endow the image with a material consistency, its very own thickness in opposition to the aforementioned notion of immateriality or evanescence resulting from the absence of colour. In this work, the woman’s body hangs in a fluctuating space, crisscrossed in the bottom area by unfinished lines. She has no head and no feet. Of her identity, only vestiges remain: a splattered, cinched, black dress, accentuating the undulating features of her torso, hips and thighs. Her clenched fists and arms stretched along the body, her straightforwardness, contribute to insinuate aggressive (yet powerless?) tension in the woman’s image, in the fleeting gesture or instant engraved in the artist’s memory.

AFC

November 2011