Sarmento is considered one of Portugal’s most important contemporary artists. His works spans a wide variety of media, from painting, drawing, and sculpture to photography, film, and video, as well as installations and, most recently, live performances. “What is my work about? I don’t know; maybe about me,” said Sarmento himself, who has been working since the 1970s with a very personal kind of iconography, creating mysterious, often disturbing visual worlds involving eroticism, violence, and death. In a technique similar to that used in literature, with multiple strands of narratives separated by characters, space, and time, Sarmento often connects different individual elements with references to literature, photography, film, art history, or mass media to create a disquieting visual entity full of ambiguities: “You don’t know where they come from. You can guess, you can imagine, but you cannot know. It’s important to me to keep the viewer always in a state of not knowing.” For our Edition Hatje Cantz Julião Sarmento has chosen a suggestive, immediately appealing collage dated 2012, available as an age-resistant giclée print on the best rag paper made by Hahnemühle art paper manufacturer. A high-end reproduction of a work of art made on an inkjet printer is called a giclée. The printing method allows for the finest gradations in tonal values and excellent detail, and is done with UV-resistant pigment inks on sturdy, layered, archive-quality art paper.
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