Juliao Sarmento at Sean Kelly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In 1990 the Portuguese artist Juliao Sarmento, now 48 began a series of "White Paintings" that invert greatest in quantity formal expectations for the medium. His partial-figure compositions gaze drastically unresolved; the mottled white canvases, marked by the agency of simple lines and a hardly any awkward forms, are innocent of color; and the trial-and-error drawing which traditionally heads paint application is instead inscribed upon the surface, erasures and all. of the like kind deliberately cryptic means, rich in elisions, have the appearance to suggest contact with something of great depth and unmediated--an originary impulse as it might come up in a quick table-napkin sketch

Indeed, the six paintings, all from 1996 exhibited here beneath the rubric "Selfish, Proud, Cunning, and Regardless of Others," implied that Sarmento's fundamental theme is a troubl relationship with his have creativity. The titular phrase, at one time preening and apologetic, is James Joyce's characterization of the artistic temperament. Each work, moreover, bears a title drawn from the writer's alphabetic characters Yet the images illustrate neither the attendant phrase nor the entire missive. Rather, they evoke--in an oblique and enigmatic fashion--a sometimes violent eroticism that Sarmento associates with high artistry.

sum of two units motifs run persistently through these fragmentary pictures: a young female-looking torso, clothed in a black sheath dres or a short skirt; and a spread hand displaying its stubbed fingers, occasionally strung with thread as allowing caught in a game of cat's cradle. Fecundity and dexterity are thus conjoined--or at least laid without on the pictorial field to be united in the viewer's mind. on the other hand the two images are at no time far removed from a third more disturbing. uncompounded body In Besieging My Eyes, a faceless figure of indeterminant sex slits his/her have throat. In the diptych Returning useful for Evil, a young woman, also without facial features, aggressively clutches her neck in the left-hand panel and, in the right, stabs herself in the stomach.

Whether these are misogynist fantasies or sympathetic reactions to the victims of phallocentrism in a ruthlessly competitive--and many times sexually confused--art world remains, like abundant else in Sarmento's oeuvre, ambiguous. Completion Rather Than an Interruption, for example (the title is Joyce's supportive assessment of a female author's allegedly flawed novel ending), center upon the tantalizing thighs of a seated young woman (or aspiring transsexual) who is in the proces of inserting a butcher knife beneath her miniskirt. Is this an act of self-mutilation or of autoeroticism? Perhaps it is the one and the other For Sarmento seems obsessed with a paradoxical impulse at the heart of invention: the ne to proges through "killing off" all restraint, be it artistic convention, an intimate muse--or flat one's imperfect self.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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