[open the box] Adriana Varejão

“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 inheritance from 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.

Biography
Adriana Varejão was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she lives and works. She has exhibited her works in several museums, among which one should highlight the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1989), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 1989), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1994 and 2002), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2001), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2001), The National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, 2004), The National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto, 2004), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki, 2006). She participated at the Venice Biennial (1995), São Paulo Biennial (1994 and 1998) and the Sydney Biennial (2001), among others. She is represented in several collections, such as the Tate Collection (London), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), Fundació “la Caixa” (Barcelona) and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo).

Bibliography
Neri, Louise (org.), Adriana Varejão, São Paulo, Takano Editora Gráfica Ltda, 2001.
Adriana Varejão / Câmara de ecos (cat.), Paris/Arles/Lisboa, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Actes Sud, Centro Cultural de Belém, 2005.