Julião Sarmento

Cometa

Best known for his paintings, Julião Sarmento recreates the intimacy and sexual tension found in this more familiar body of work in Cometa, a piece first performed in 2009. The performance, which takes place in a hotel room, is designed to be witnessed by one person at a time. Set to original music specially composed by Portuguese musician Paulo Furtado, otherwise known as The Legendary Tigerman, is a study of the longings, desire and discomfort that attends the close encounter of strangers.

Cometa
33.807139, -116.546389
Palm Springs, California, USA
Desert X 2017
Performances ran from Feb. 21 – Feb. 26, 2017.

Julião Sarmento (1948 – 2021)

Julião will be remembered across the globe for his ceaseless curiosity, his intellect laced with self-effacing humor, and an urgent desire to discover within his art the breadth and depth he found in the literature he loved that was so important to him.

In Palm Springs for the first Desert X in 2017 Julião found himself drawn not to the mid-century architectural gloss he knew so well but to the remnants of a seedy motel culture on the verge of extinction from the developments of freshly scrubbed money and minds. This was the chosen stage for Cometa, a performance that began in the parking lot of the Desert Inn that led eventually to a dimly lit room where a couple swayed together in an atmosphere of carnality, romance, and desperation. The mise en scène was intense and captivating. The alchemy of elements - the run-down room, the anonymous couple, and the discomfort of our own dual roles as participant and witness - perfectly orchestrated Julião’s aria to loneliness and thwarted desire. Cometa may have been a footnote to a career that reached many people and places but like all of Julião’s work, it engaged the fundamentals of what in another era would have been called the human condition. Nowadays it might be enough to just call it humanity and more than anything else that is what Julião Sarmento set out to contribute to and understand. He will be greatly missed.