The body, sexuality and the erotic in the work of Júlio Pomar (2019) is an installation conceived by Salomé Lamas, which the artist and filmmaker created at the invitation of the Atelier-Museu, to show following the exhibition «Júlio Pomar: Formas que se become others», about the erotic dimension in this artist's career. The piece establishes free correspondences between the painter's writings and his pictorial work, focusing mainly on Júlio Pomar's explorations and concerns around the body, sexuality and the erotic. […]

In an installation made with slide projectors and sound, the filmmaker uses archival images, sometimes showing fragments of works, other times their entirety. These images are reworked, slightly altered, underlining some element (a trace, a stain) or reinforcing what is intended to be communicated (processes, materials, methodologies, references), questioning what is traditionally considered the content of a work. What is the content of a painting? From a drawing? From an image? What is figuratively represented, or also its material and formal dimension? In the realization of the work, Salomé Lamas, starting from the consultation of published books about the artist, of various digital files and other information, in the impossibility but ambition of seeing everything, also problematizes the idea of ​​«archive». In doing so, she questions the way in which Art History, with its scientific criteria, and sometimes some morality, arranges, categorizes and fixes ways of seeing. In this work, bringing into play an authorial dimension, her own, the filmmaker reorganizes and edits fragments of a common cultural heritage, reminding us of Godard in the Livro da Imagem:

«Do you still remember how we used to exercise our thinking? We used to start from a dream. We asked ourselves how it was possible that, in total darkness, colors of such intensity appeared in us. Great things were said, important, amazing, profound and just things, in a sweet, low tone of voice. Image and word.»

[Sara Antónia Matos / Pedro Faro]