Juliao Sarmento
GHOSTS
10 October – 26 December 2004
PROJECT ROOM
Rui Calcada Bastos / Susana Gaudencio
Curated by Miguel Amado
CENTRO DE ARTES VISUAIS (CAV)
Colegio das Artes, 10, 3000 Coimbra, Portugal
Tuesday – Sunday: 10am – 7pm
T. + 351 239826178
F. + 351 239820154
E. infocav [at] cav.net4b.pt
Juliao Sarmento, Ghosts, 2004, Courtesy Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon.
The Centro de Artes Visuais is presenting Ghosts, an exhibition by the Portuguese artist Juliao Sarmento comprised of two commissioned works, entitled Ghosts and Ghost. Ghosts and Ghost are two installations that bring together video and sound, and the interactive character of which plays a fundamental role in their aesthetic reception. Several sonorous elements, both in the main gallery and on the upper floor, draw the visitor into different screening rooms. In them the projectors are activated by the visitor’s presence; however, one sees little more than fleeting bodies, whether these are of a woman or of two children. The spectator’s gaze thus transforms them into mere spectres. These works are based on a presence/absence duality and are thus a game of perception in which the protagonist is the audience.
Sarmento is publicly aclaimed due to his work in the field of painting; however, in the seventies, at the beginning of his career, he also explored media such as film, video and photography, to which he returned in the nineties. In this field his work expresses the conceptual and formal driving lines underlying all of his practice, among which there is the dialogue between the image and the written or spoken word, the tension between narrative construction and deconstruction and the possibilities and limits of representation of desire.
The Centro de Artes Visuais is also presenting the Project Room programme, curated by Miguel Amado, dedicated to the promotion of emerging Portuguese artists. The third in this series of exhibitions includes a video by Rui Calcada Bastos and a sequence of paintings and an animation picture by Susana Gaudencio. In Casting Thoughts (2002), Calcada Bastos is presenting a reflection on the role played by the psychological dimension in the construction of personal identity through the conjugation, on the one hand, of the image of the face of a young woman materialised in several close ups of her gaze and, on the other hand, of the sound of a needle at the end of the playing of a vinyl record in continuous broadcasting. In Panorama #1 (2001) and Noite branca (2004), Gaudencio proposes an exercise on the relationship between pictorial representation and cinematographic experience, crossing the languages of painting and cinema in the sense that both works form narrative settings in an imagined fiction, with decors and characters inspired by biographical elements from the author’s own life.
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The Centro de Artes Visuais (CAV) is a contemporary art institution based in Coimbra, Portugal. The CAV is located in a recently refurbished historical building in the downtown of the city. The CAV has a main gallery that comprises around 500 square meters and an area devoted to small-scale interventions. The CAV is funded by the Portuguese government through the Ministry of Culture, as well as by the Coimbra Town Council.
The CAV holds a collection, organises five temporary exhibitions each year, both solo and group shows, and runs a Project Room programme. The CAV’s aim is to present the work of international and Portuguese acclaimed artists and to promote Portuguese emerging artists. The CAV opened its doors to the public in February 2003. Since then, the CAV has organised seven exhibitions. One should highlight firstly “Gabriel Orozco”, the first solo show by this worldwide acclaimed artist in Portugal, and “Work”, a group show about work in contemporary culture. In 2004, CAV presented two monographic shows, one by the British artist Jemima Stehli and the Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, as well as a group show about football and contemporary art entitled “On side”.
