Adriana Varejão

The Baroque always connects two extremes, like light and shadow, in one body, one painting. History outside against a wild body inside, cultured and uncultured, cooked and uncooked, greed and expressionism, rationalism and irrationality, cold and hot. —Adriana Varejão In her richly diverse oeuvre, Adriana Varejão uses the Baroque tactics of simulation, juxtaposition, and parody to reflect on the mythic pluralism of Brazilian identity and the complex social, cultural, and aesthetic interactions that produced it. Varejão draws upon a potent visual legacy animated by the histories of colonialism and transnational exchange to create a confluence of hybridized forms—paintings that are both architectural and sculptural; theatrical, painted sculptures; mesmerizing multichannel videos—that expose the multivalent nature of memory and representation. Varejão was born in Rio de Janeiro. She attended the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage from 1983 to 1985. In 1986 she began to experiment with the medium of oil painting, reimagining in thick impasto the ornate Baroque frescoes and religious relics of the eighteenth-century churches in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. In 1992, Varejão spent three months traveling in China, where she studied Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) ceramics and classical Chinese landscape painting. From that journey, she began to consider how Eurocentric narratives distort or even erase the histories of various artistic methods and motifs, and subsequently embarked on a series of paintings in which familiar iconography—maps, religious imagery, colonial genre scenes—is interrupted with simulated bloody gashes and fleshy extrusions, or more subtle narrative subversions. Her work from this period makes explicit reference to the violence and eroticism of Brazilian history in the spirit of antropofagia , a key concept in Brazilian modernism that reclaims the anthropophagic rituals of the Tupi people, transforming the social taboo of cannibalism into a symbolic totem of cultural absorption in postcolonial Brazil. Upon her return from China, Varejão began collecting examples of regional Brazilian folk art such as ex-votos and azulejos , glazed terra-cotta tiles of Arab origin that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese national art since the Middle Ages. Fascinated by the azulejo and its legacy in Brazil as a metaphor for both forced and voluntary cultural miscegenation, Varejão developed her Azulejão ( Big Tile ) paintings (1988–). For the support, she applies a thick layer of viscous plaster to a canvas laid flat; as the plaster slowly dries, the cracks that form produce a cartography of deep surface fissures. While the early Azulejão paintings, featuring fragments of larger schema, were often arranged in vast grids of disrupted narrative, the larger-scale singular works of more recent years present seismic surfaces, at once abstract, geological, and corporeal. For Varejão, the spatial drama of the Baroque assumes many forms: In the Ruinas de charque ( Meat Ruins ), a series of large-scale, freestanding sculptures that she began in 1999, Varejão simulates tiled architectural fragments, roiling with painted viscera. Specific locations cited in the subtitles of these works suggest that familiar spaces are haunted by violent specters” past and present. The Saunas and Baths series (2001–) are completely invented tiled interiors painted in intricate, monochromatic gradations, appearing of coolly sterile yet psychologically charged. In these labyrinths of the mind, light beams from an undetectable source and traces of the human body appear, here and there, in the form of stray hairs or blood. In 2008, the Galeria Adriana Varejão, a permanent custom-designed pavilion, opened at Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brumadinho, Brazil, and in 2012, Varejão’s solo exhibition Histórias às Margens opened at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; the show traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. In 2019, Varejão had two survey exhibitions: Adriana Varejão: Por uma retórica cannibal , which opened at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, traveling to Mamam, Recife; and Adriana Varejão: Otros cuerpos detrás at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Suturas, fissuras, ruínas , a retrospective of more than sixty works, opened at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2022. In recent years, Varejão has developed a confluent interest in the culture of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern Mexico. In January 2017, she visited Puebla as a guest of the Museo Amparo to study local talavera and cholula polychrome pottery. Her subsequent engagement with talavera , whose heterogeneous cultural sources parallel those of the Brazilian Baroque impulse that has guided her artistic inspiration thus far, has catalyzed a new direction in her paintings in which the clean shapes and bright hues of hard-edge abstraction are brought into dialogue with pre-Hispanic artisanal forbears. Through this conscious interweaving of time, culture, and place, Varejão draws attention to the parallels between aesthetic systems previously separated by dominant master narratives and raises vital questions about the life of forms in art.