- ALEXANDRE MELO Territory of Desire -- GERMANO CELANT Juliao Sarmento: A Sensual Revelation (essay/interview) / Works -- List of Works -- Exhibitions -- Selected Bibliography. // When analyzing the whole of Juliao Sarmento's oeuvre, what initially strikes one is the progressive creation of a solid, coherent body of work that is at once deeply his own and constantly suggests new readings; its is loyal to long-standing personal obsessions, themes, and problems, but remains in dialogue with the present. During the twenty-five years Sarmento has worked as an artist, he has witnessed a number of significant shifts in what we think of as contemporary art, from Conceptualism and post-Pop to the return of figurative painting, and has borrowed from those movements most akin to his own artistic project: particularly various post-conceptual practices in vogue in the mid '70s and the "fragmentary figuration" characteristic of some early '80s painting. Sarmento has, however, managed to preserve and explore a personal repertoire of images and concepts that are the source of his output. At the same time, through a creative confrontation with what he has found most stimulating in each artistic situation, Sarmento has continued to renew and diversify his artistic practice. Sarmento's international prominence, evidenced by his participation in Documenta in 1982 and 1987, is associated with the "return to painting" and "new figuration" that characterized the changing artistic current during the late '70s and early '80s. However, Sarmento never shared the aims of these trends and their purely pictorial pleasures, chromatic or material, their impulsive or expressive recording of reality, or their anecdotal, primary or illustrative treatment of desire and sex. The sensuality of Sarmento's paintings, expressed through texture, complexity of composition, and ever-enigmatic images, display a Sadean delicacy, and a logic of perversion that leads to greater visual and theoretical sophistication. Thus, as Jan Avgikos observes, "Sarmento's paintings certainly appeal to those who crave narrative, yet they are much more savvy, suggesting that painterliness, levels of psychological engagement, and symbols that bounce in and out of the frame need not be anathema to conceptual practice." {Artforum, January 1, 1992). Sarmento's oeuvre thus attempts to make the work of visual invention and creation coincide with an exploration of the territory of desire and its infinitely modulated terrain. Thus the process of visual creation is revealed as a dynamic equivalent of configuring the territory of desire itself. The energy and tension that underlie the processes of creation and of configuring desire are the motivating factors behind Sarmento's project, and ensure that his work remains open-ended and constantly in flux. Sarmento's works present no final thesis or hypothesis . (Alexandre Melo) // Julião Sarmento (born in Lisbon, 1948) is a Portuguese multimedia artist and painter. Sarmento studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. He began exhibiting film, video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation and multimedia in the seventies, but also developed several site-specific projects. He has exhibited his work extensively in one-man and group shows. Sarmento represented Portugal at the Venice Biennial in 1997. His work is represented in several museums and private collections, including a partial room showing at London's Tate Modern. The work featured is largely collage-based or a combination of collage and sketched images. Sarmento lives and works in Estoril, Portugal; he is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Pilar Corrias in London, Galeria Fortes Vilaça in São Paulo, Giorgio Persano in Turin and Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris and Brussels .