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26/10/2006

Juliao Sarmento

Fundacion Marcelino Botin, Santander

Withholding. Paintings, Sculptures, Video 1994- 2006

An attractive woman enters an anonymous building. She walks past some crates and wrapped up canvases, throws her coat on a table and stands against a white wall. As the romantic music from Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet begins to play, she begins to take off her clothes. It is a professional performance, an act of carefully calibrated seduction, a deliberate play of exposing and withholding. After a few minutes, the woman stands naked against the wall. And then she starts to get dressed again, the act of covering precisely mirroring the performance of undressing.

The scene of the action is the studio of the artist. The video is called Parasite. Who is the parasite? Is it the artist feeding off this model whom he has paid to perform in his studio like countless other European painters have done for many centuries (you only have to read Delacroix’ Journals to be reminded of the role of the model as providing more than the pleasures of looking). Is it the viewer, gazing at the image of the woman from a safe distance ? Or is it the very structure of looking in our culture today, configured around a particular economy of possession and exchange. In fact the video plays with our expectations by playing in reverse.

In one of Sarmento’s recent sculptures, I love you too much (with Crate), a fibreglass figure of a woman in a black dress sits on a crate which looks like it has been built for a painting. Her head is concealed by a burlap sack. She looks like she is waiting for something, or being made to wait, a hostage to some desire. Cast in fibreglass from a model, the scene of the work has shifted from the place of making to the place of exhibition. Like the woman stripping in the video, the figure of the woman in the sculpture is both exposed and withheld.

Juliao Sarmento’s work of the past decade continues his relentlesss pursuit of this unresolvable duality. The image of a person, often a woman, is at the heart of this exploration. But the image is always incomplete, the situation ambiguous. As he himself has stated “the subject is what is not there." The picture is only a surface, after all.

Sarmentos’ works always come in series, like glimpses of an unfolding narrative or frames from a film. The paintings in the upstairs galleries are drawn from several series made between 1994 and 2006 in which Sarmento plays with a recurrent repertoire of forms and motifs inscribed on to the white skin of his paintings. Architectural plans and human gestures, straight lines and curves, segments of text, signs of passion, suggestions of pain.

In Sarmento’s work, there is always something lying beneath what is visible, or beyond the limits of the frame. The more they hold your attention, the more they appear to withhold information. Gradually the projections of the viewer are exposed, stripped bare of the consolations of narrative. James Westcott’s description of Parasite as “a psychoanalytical plunge into the perverse pleasure and strange comfort of deprivation and powerlessness" summarises the unsettling dynamic between what Juliao Sarmento’s work suggests and what the onlooker experiences.

Sarmento’s work mines a deep seam of ambivalence. The ground of the work is unstable, the territory they begin to delineate is uncharted. Many of the works in Withholding suggest some kind of performance. Possibly on stage or screen, possibly not. Possibly at home, maybe in a studio. But the real performing is always in the mind of the person looking in or looking on...

James Lingwood, curator

Image: Kiss my eyes (with chairs) 2004, Courtesy Galeria Pepe Cobo, Madrid

Fechas: Opening october 27th h 8pm

Sala de exposiciones Fundacio'n Marcelino Botin
calle Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, 3 - Santander

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