Julião Sarmento

Julião Sarmento grew up in Portugal, ruled by Salazar’s fascist dictatorship until he was 26 years old.

From the beginning of his artistic career, he has utilized various media such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video installation. However, medium and technique are never an end in themselves but always potential forms of expression for his poetic reflections on love, desire, and death. Themes and motifs are interconnected, with his driving force being a continuous exploration of the relationship between body and mind, allowing for varied interpretations of his work.

His work deals with the presence of absence. He creates a dynamic space of possibilities by leaving a lot of space in his canvases. The woman (or her body) is the central object in all his work. In his videos, he seemingly objectively explores pornography in terms of seduction and desire. However, references to desire do not necessarily take the form of explicitly sexual or sexualized representations of figures or situations.

The two central works for this exhibition are the video Parasite (2003) and the slide series Flashback (1999), consisting of a series of 81 photos taken by the artist between 1971 and 1999, accompanied by a soundtrack by Arto Lindsay. The life-size projection of Parasite is particularly seductive, featuring a sensual model set to the theatrical music of Serge Prokofiev. While image manipulation plays an essential role in his work, Sarmento also consistently takes spontaneous photos without a specific setting, which exudes the artificial atmosphere or glamour of fashion magazines. These snapshots, a selection seen in Flashback, reflect the evolving zeitgeist where seduction and desire are also subject to change.

In conjunction with his exhibition at MDD, a novel compiled by Sarmento based on his favourite authors will be released. Additionally, he has also created an edition specifically for MDD.