This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Julião Sarmento: Timeline, held at Fundação Carmona e Costa, curated by Delfim Sardo, between April 8 and May 19, 2018.

Julião Sarmento's work not only includes drawing, but is guided by the practice of drawing. Not because the artist has sketchbooks and sketchbooks and projects like many artists do (they don't exist, as far as I know), but because his works, in the most diverse media he has been using, from film to photography, painting or to performance, stem from a continuous graphic procedure in which a plethora of visual signs — including text — recursively emerge.

In most cases, these signs have a textual correlation, being able to be described with words that describe them (houses, plants, animals, knives, bodies), other times, although more rarely, they are hybrid graphic procedures that cannot be described by single words (legs/scissors, arms/trunks) or that imply actions (cut, pierce, run, swim).

[…] Like a permanent circular labyrinth, or an incessant loop, Julião Sarmento's drawing production is all mutually contemporary, it does not define any succession other than the descriptive need of those who write about it.

And, for that reason, this exhibition (and this book) was built counterclockwise, as a lifeline that is always seen from a present point of view, but which, seen from here, does not propose any nostalgia because everything gravitates to the same present of bodies and their mixture, to what comes and what goes, which reappears in the simultaneity between uterus and tomb that constitutes the fragile material of a possible timeline.

[Delfim Sardo]