On 24 April 2021, Galleria Giorgio Persano inaugurates Julião Sarmento’s solo exhibition On Goya in its spaces at Via Stampatori 4, Turin, Italy. The exhibition develops around four large paintings and a table-sculpture, inspired by the work of the Spanish master.
The idea for the exhibition came about during the artist’s period of self-confinement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, in response to the general feeling of confusion and estrangement, and as an exercise in dialogue between monochrome painting (which has invested his work for several years now) and Goya’s powerful works, admired by Sarmento during the Solo la voluntad me sobra exhibition at the Prado Museum (2019-2020).
It marks an attempt to make painting and drawing interact, dwelling on their antithetical aspects, and establishing a dialogue between two historical realities whose genealogies and sensibilities intertwine on several occasions.
The artist juxtaposes the grey tones of the figures and images of skies and seas, charged with dramatic meanings to the suspended temporality of the monochromes. The elements of the canvases join together to give life to a new narrative, in a movement and exchange between the cosmic and human dimensions.
To these “painting-drawings”, the artist adds a new volume, borrowed from the plasticity of eighteenth-century Spanish works on paper. It is in particular the table-sculpture-object, which is not only an object, nor only a sculpture, nor simply a table, Cazador en su puesto, cazador al acecho (2020) that becomes, in the words of the artist, “a sort of three-dimensional vision of Goya’s drawings”.
This new cycle of works, which meets the public for the first time in the spaces of Galleria Giorgio Persano, belongs to a trilogy, with two other different exhibitions planned for this year in London and Paris.

mpefm ITALY art press release