Julião Sarmento. Flashback. Alicia Chillida

Flashback begins the same way it concludes: a super 8 color film showing the legs and torso of a woman walking down a street. It is matched by another identical black and white projection. The camera follows the woman from far and near. The gait is uninterrupted. This obsessive image is never resolved, the denouement and climax are withheld. The experience continues indefinitely. This happens again in another film: Faces / FacesThe 1976, a loop that repeats itself over and over again.

The exhibition has been conceived as a retrospective that avoids a linear and chronological reading, and uses the cinematographic structure to analyze and articulate the obsessions and motivations around which Julião Sarmento's work revolves - memory and desire - through 116 pieces in different media, painting on canvas, drawings, film, video and slides. For this occasion, the work FlashbackThe result of a collaboration between Sarmento and musician Arto Lindsay, a fragmentary type of autobiography with slides from the artist's archive. The images of the present are the memory of a past. There is no chronology, no narrative, no apparent logic, only glimpses, suggestions, snapshots.

A selection of Sarmento's work could be seen in 1997 at the Palacio de Velázquez, in the group exhibition In the skin of the bullThe exhibition, curated by Aurora Garcia, was a reflection on the parallel situation of openness and creative energy that developed in Spain and Portugal in the late seventies. Sarmento's plastic language has been evolving in its formal development, remaining faithful to those primitive impulses that move his most intimate artistic concerns: seduction, sex and latent violence.

Before his works the viewer is confronted with an inconcrete moment frozen in real time, in which the action may have already happened, or is about to happen, or is happening right in front of our eyes, which watch as surprised witnesses in the act of looking.

The rooms of the White paints of the 1990s are illuminated by flashbacks of smaller constellations of works, or individual works from the mid-seventies and eighties: photographic works, photographic installations, films and collages.

"What I do today is part of what I did yesterday and what I did twenty years ago and what I will do tomorrow. For me it's like an archeology of thought, even now when I'm working, I think of works from twenty years ago that for one reason or another come to my mind." Sarmento's use of an analogy with archeology is illuminating. In the same way that there is no tabula rasa For the archaeologist, neither is there a blank canvas for Sarmento: it is imprinted with experience and memory.

Flashback charts a compulsive cartography of desire - a map that we can feel, but never fully comprehend, a journey that, like the exhibition itself, we are destined never to end.

To Julião Sarmento. Alicia Chillida

"A body descends from the hands of the night.
Pursuit among the trees,
the body glistens in the undergrowth, the flesh warm,
the figure escapes the frame, there is no one chasing it,
the hand holding the gun, has disappeared.
Terror is the color of silence.

White nights. White bodies. White sex and tongue.
Eyes and touch discover a body,
before a disjointed succession of visions and instantaneous sensations,
perceptions destroyed as soon as they are formed.
A missing body in his body that
had made his disappear:
perception that is dispersion
perception of fading when fading away,
by the way of dissolutions remakes the forms
until it manifests again in a body:
that body that their eyes are looking at". (...)

(Excerpts from the catalog, ed. MNCARS, Madrid, 1999).