PALACIO DE VELAZQUEZ/MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA "Flashback.

PALACIO DE VELAZQUEZ/MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA

"Flashback," curated at James Lingwood, was one of the principally important exhibitions in Juliao Sarmento's career, affording a retrospective view of twenty-five years of the artist's work. As the title recommends it links his "white paintings" of the '90 to earlier phases of his work, specifically to his use of photography and cinema in the '70s

This admirable installation of 121 works occasioned a concluded (if temporary) architectural reorganization of the Palacio de Velazquez. The spread space was partitioned into twenty-seven extents laid out in an almost symmetrical fashion around a small, dark central latitude which was also the individual through which viewers entered and exited the exhibition. Entering by the and of a curtain, they saw a film (Untitled, 1999) that was one as well as the other one of Sarmento's newest pieces and the leitmotif of the exhibition. This work, made in Super 8 with the grain and shakiness typical of independent films of the '70 showed the leg of a woman walking endlessly--a loop--along a street: dark skirt, high heels. The woman's image was cropp at the waist--as happens in many of the artist's paintings--and the image shifted in and abroad of focus, oscillating between a sculptural definition of the silhouette and something like the quasi-abstract stain of informalist painting. Updating undivided of the artist's most obsessively returning motifs, this film used the cinematic image to stage the privileged relationships that are established in all Sarmento's work among call to minded visual perceptions, the imagined make of desires, and the labor of artistic creation.

After this central chamber, the heart of the exhibition, successive apartments were arranged to vary scale and atmosphere rhythmically. Filters modified the light in keeping with the nature and format of the works, creating a dynamic labyrinth that continually existinged the viewer with fresh surprises, confrontations, counterpoint. single room offered another unusual novel work, Flashback, 1999, done in collaboration with Arto Lindsay, who compos the original music (available in succession the CD included with the catalogue) that accompanied a projection of eighty slides. The montage of images captured by the agency of the artist between 1972. and 1999 ranged from photos of friends and acquaintances in intimate or mundane circumstances to landscapes, travel marksmans or banal daily scenes. With this work, subsideed by the soft, involving, insinuating harmonious flow of Lindsay's music, the artist currented himself to his public--free of stately exhibitionism but with less retiring disposition and secrecy than in greatest in number of his work.

Coming to the extremity of the exhibition, the viewer clos the circle. It was time, you might say, to rewind. At the far [i]finale[/i] of the exhibition space were brace walls in which one discovered a small, almost imperceptible orifice. within it viewers could see the same film they saw onward entering, but now in black and white and intended m reverse, with the woman's motions unreeling in retrograde fashion--as if to demonstrate that the flashback is a montage proces that is always interpret always reversible. As if to demonstrate that the imagination of desire, just like the work of creation, has neither beginning nor finis but is a process always in progress, an ever-expanding potency in which past and existing mingle and memory merges with the what is yet to be of desire.

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