In the 1980s, Julião Sarmento returned to painting, after a period of intense exploration on conceptual languages and experiments, embodied through diversified means. Maintaining a research practice focused on the enigmatic dialectics of the human body, the objects, and words, at this stage his production shifts towards an expressive, intimate and subjective pictorial context.

Marked by a representation of expressionist style, this composition develops from a series of images and symbols, some recognisable, others more enigmatic, which confer a disquieting character on the whole. The narrative suggestion is marked by the integration of heterogeneous elements that create a game between what is visible and apparently identifiable and what is hidden, mysterious, and fragmentary: the phantom body, the animal's head, the spirals, the black rectangle with a suggestion of landscape, the elements evoking hunting scenes from prehistoric rock art, the dolmens and the shapes that can be imagined in the drawings, together with spots that appear dynamically throughout the composition. These formal and referential components, and the palette of earthy tones, evoke the pictorial archetypes of humanity. The introduction of the word "Olisipo", the Roman name for the city of Lisbon, also seems to suggest ancestrally - in this case, related to the privileged geographical space of the painter's experiences and memories. Although the textual element refers to the title, it is not the key to unequivocal decoding: mystery is (and should be) always present.

JB