[poster], Don Juan, Julião Sarmento, Porto, Galeria Módulo
1977

                                                Rimbaud: Science avec patience
                                                ……………………………………………….
                                                Elle est retrouvée
                                                Quoi? – L'Eternité.

For the time being, we are still in the era of pa-tience.  Much has been seen, much has been discovered until the arrival of the
machine and the knowledge of its significant factors similar to certain pre-concepts on Man. Which the largest confessed violence, the largest indignities have succeeded in destroying irremediably.

Men and the others. How to re-trust Nature with the obstinate and ingenuous violence of a Sade? How to dedicate again inner peace to the speculation of a landscape, which was wished conscientiously poetically human, from Rousseau to the romantics and pre-romantics? It is in name of Reason (eternally obstinate) that these reasons (lyrics, idealistic, conformist) are melted. Past and flags make the dark from the side of Nothing. For the time being….

                                                Rimbaud:… L'élégance. la science. la violence!
                                                ...................................................................
                                                Voici Ie temps des ASSASSINS

Death of Man consummates itself. Long live the Man! Patience and rigour, a new science, a new   communication must be invented. A social intercourse where everything becomes again virginal and crystalline. Rupture. No compromise, re-invent the Feast.

                                                Rimbaud: J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage

The key for everyone.  Unique and irreplaceable. First, the reduction to zero, it is still the time of the assassins), then the collection,' the methodical, patient inventory. Make a slave of the past and make it a future. For instance, as a matter of …

Some "artists" wish to be only the workmen of Future, as Achille Bonito Oliva writes now in a recent book on "vanguarda", that art has acquired finally a human whisper, it is no longer a run to the new, but a possibility of deep reflection on specific investigations.

Instead of vanguard art, we could call it research art. Instead of anti-art, we could call it research, etc. Research?

To search anything that, with no oral cut, does not present in other fields (the visual one, for instance) any metaphoric mark, in the sense used by Barthes. In this case, the objects (visual, for instance) should get together as tools of total freedom. In other words, they should have lost all their alienation factors, extension of the past, of all a generation of death which corrodes time, our time. (For a better understanding, we consider freedom as the contrary of all data. The contrary, for instance, of what we call today automation. Let us say also, and still as an example, that while objects that crowd the normality of the so-called modern life show a tendency to automation, with no possible escape, the objects we imagine above should show a tendency to contradict all established plans. Is a chair something to be seated on, or an instrument of aggression? Does a bird exist absolutely or only through the code of a precarious knowledge?)

In this context, painting, photography, visual research operate with passionate heat and coldly in the presentation of everything: conceptually destroyed; in the re-verification of all obsolete codes; and with patience in the production of new ones – for a new articulation of one relationship with things, with our things (and words), with us.

We are working so that the Great Collective Feast may be possible again.

Julião Sarmento is working. And he is working towards this target. With more or less conscience of it, he is a futurist.

Ernesto de Sousa
December 1976