Adriana Varejão: Incarnations

Map of Lopo Homem (original from 1992 destroyed, reproduced in 2004) is often cited as the beginning of Varejão’s artistic career. The horizontal oval shows a painted copy of a map by the Portuguese cartographer Lopo Homem, which suggests a connection between Asia and South America, with a gaping wound in the middle. This use of a historical reference, which goes beyond mere quotation, is typical of the artist. By manipulating images through parody, she succeeds in questioning them and the world views on which they are based. While, formally, the expansion of the painted pictorial space into a sculptural object, the actual act of cutting into the picture plane, the partial stitching, and the craquelure  can be interpreted within art-historical discourse, Varejão literally puts her finger in the wound of Brazilian post-colonial discourse and viscerally demonstrates just how thin the scab is that has formed around this injury: ‘My wounds help to desecrate history as told by the victors – which has been accorded the status of truth – in order to reveal a history that takes into account other narratives, those of the vanquished, beneath the surface and on the margins of official history.’

 ‘With her pictorial practice, Varejão places herself in the middle of a transgressive, transcultural discourse in which the Christian iconography of the Baroque is transformed into a subversive form…’

Varejão’s themes are deeply rooted in the sensibility of the Baroque, which is characterised by its unsettling tension of contrasts, illusionistic effects and theatrical rhetoric, and which plays a prominent role in the context of Brazil’s cultural history. She repeatedly references as an important influence Neo-Baroque Latin American literature, regarded as subversive and counter-hegemonic, and cites in particular the Cuban author, critic and artist Severo Sarduy. In Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Written on a Body), 1969, an essay collection on art and literature grounded in psychoanalytic theory, Sarduy succeeds in bringing together seemingly disparate concepts such as animal mimicry, tattooing, transvestism, anamorphosis and trompe l’oeil. With her pictorial practice, Varejão places herself in the middle of a transgressive, transcultural discourse in which the Christian iconography of the Baroque is transformed into a subversive form, secularised, and expanded upon by Indigenous and Black peoples. Central to this is the motif of incorporation and reversal, which presents itself as a carnivalesque play of mirrors reflecting upon the Self and the Other. As an emancipatory moment, this provides the key to Brazilian cultural identity and was famously described by Oswald de Andrade within the metaphor of cannibalism in his Anthropophagic Manifesto, 1928. Unlike a historian, however, Varejão takes the liberty of recombining different literary and artistic references, placing them in deceptively similar visual registers, thus creating new contexts of meaning. In Entrance Figure III, 2005, for example, she interweaves the allegorical figure of America, quoted from an engraving by Theodor de Bry who never set foot in Brazil, with the tradition of welcome figures, which in the form of tile panels separated the public and private areas of Portuguese palaces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While  these welcome figures typically represent courtly men, the artist replaces the figure with the female body of America, connoted as ‘wild’ and ‘foreign’, presenting a decapitated head, a self-portrait of the artist herself, rather than the original arrows. While the viewer is initially taken in by the decorative ornamentation of the various surfaces, recognising the often-reproduced interwoven painted pattern on a markedly two-dimensional surface, the subversive invitation to engage with a foreign space is emphasised.

‘Her multifaceted painting resembles a psychological search into the past with which she uncovers the atrocities of colonialism layer by layer and anchors decolonisation as a continuous process in the bodies of the present.’

Kitchen Tiles with a Variety of Game, 1995, follows in the genre tradition of butchery paintings, from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox to Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat, and thus refers not only to the transience of life but also to the similarity of humans and animals in death. Regularly in Varejão’s paintings, the structure of the square tile establishes the image’s logic. Inspired by the often carelessly restored churches in Brazil, the hanging hybrid creatures are reminiscent of fragmentary artefacts, or a picture produced using the exquisite corpse method. Exploratory Laparotomy I, 1996, on the other hand, works primarily through the different contrasting surfaces. Blood-smeared white tiles form the background for three human skins, the surfaces of which are emphasised by irezumi, elaborate Japanese tattoos. The entrails oozing from the bodies is depicted in a Baconesque and drastically expressionistic opulence of colour and texture, while the surfaces of the scattered organs are decorated with the ornamental patterns of azulejos, Portuguese tiles. In the visual fusion of a medical dissection with the age of so-called ‘discovery’ and its appropriation, not least through the process of mapping, the artist finds a physically tangible aesthetic form to make the transgenerational traumas of her country visible. Her multifaceted painting resembles a psychological search into the past with which she uncovers the atrocities of colonialism layer by layer and anchors decolonisation as a continuous process in the bodies of the present. Varejão sometimes transfers her painting entirely into sculpture and, as in Ruin 22, 2022, works with the architectural motif of the ruin from which the bodily innards emerge. This enables her to reflect on the connection between the human body, labour, cultural achievement, and its failures.

‘With her Azulejos series, since 1988, the artist focuses in an increasingly abstract manner on the materiality of surfaces…’