With its white light on a dark background, Tales on Dirty Realism evokes, through the inscriptions as well as the collages with feminine figures – dissonant as far as the viewpoints are concerned –, the universe of the moving image that has always held Julião Sarmento’s attention: the possibility of evoking the moment, movement and suspension, is therefore revisited through the collage of black and white images arranged in a non-sequential asymmetry. The juxtaposition of the drawing of a peacock in profile, of a part of red rope and of the large, central white-stenciled text results in a competition to concentrate a multitude of meanings, not all of them harmonious, within the visual space.

Some fragmented literary references can be recognized in this artwork, namely the universe of Raymond Carver (1938-1988) or Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), both North American writers associated with “dirty realism”, a popular literary movement in vogue in the United States during the 1980’s, featuring stories of glamourless, delinquent or vagrant lives – often in conflict – spent in poor or marginalized suburbs. The collage of printed images and the superposition of painting and writing on a black background compete to enhance an effect of narrative incongruence based on the approximation to iconographic references and dispersed mnemonics. Tales on Dirty Realism thus pursues an idea of fictionalized narrativity, whether transfigured and/or mutilated, extensively developed by Julião Sarmento from the 1970’s onwards, in painting, drawing, photography or video.

AFC

November 2011