Azulejões (com volutas) – políptico

BAROQUE SAMBA
“Azulejões”, was what this Brazilian artist called them. Large painted tiles amplified on a scale such that their subject becomes the cracked turned into a breach. The enormous size of the tiles, rigorously photocopied from their real models, is a great technical feat, but that is not the key aspect, because our gaze does not make us see the paintings as paintings on canvas (which they are), but as enormous ceramic surfaces.
Since her early production, Adriana Varejão has dealt with the issue of the colonial relationship between Brazil and Portugal, genre paintings that show the disgrace and the libidinous side of the colonial plantations. In these azulejões, of which we have two fragments of a giant panel, the memory of the Portuguese Baroque is converted onto an immense, overseas, Brazilian scale, turned into an enormous maritime wave as complex as the saga of Brazil.
It is therefore not a visual discourse on colonialism. It is about the relationship between Brazil and Portugal, about the way that the Baroque was appropriated by Samba, how the decorative volute takes on an epic and carnal scale, how the pleat in cloth becomes a fold in flesh, as is the case in her sculptures.
These paintings, however, go beyond the issue of colonialism, because their fissures are an inheritancefrom Lúcio Fontana, the Italian artist who made precise cuts in monochrome paintings in the nineteen forties. In these fissures Adriana Varejão finds the passport to a universe of the flesh. Sometimes in her paintings there are tongues of flesh (so realistic that they become grotesque) coming from the inside.
In the azulejões that violence is more contained, but horror peeks out from beneath the decoration, beneath the decadence of their cracks.

Delfim Sardo