Julião Sarmento is presenting his second solo exhibition at the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery. Under the title The Perfect Home, using key concepts of recent gender theory, the pieces on display question the hegemonic social and political discourse.

Each of the ten monochrome paintings that make up the present installation, painted in different colours and distributed around the room, are associated through inscriptions, situated on the edges of the canvases, with predefined roles that link the colours to certain rooms of a house (The Perfect Home), while simultaneously establishing connections between those colours with spaces and famous feminist texts of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

From the outset, through scenes, images and simulations, and using sculptures, paintings and performances, Sarmento’s work has explored the power exercised over women, false roles of femininity, domination and subjugation, cliché and fetish, as well as the political dimension of these when it comes to understanding the ideological foundations of Western history of art.

In this exhibition, these gender roles, assumed throughout much of history and questioned by pioneers such as Linda Nochlin – who have shifted the paradigm and fractured the solid structure of analysis and perception which was previously the basis of a false, hypocritical and perverse understanding – address domestic themes, specifically of the home, and the assumption of certain rooms in relation to associated social spaces, and their corresponding functions usually linked to gender, based on the establishment of the hegemonic discourse.