Adriana Varejão

Parede com incisóes á la Fontana (Wall with Incisions in the Style of Fontana) (2000) depicts a light-blue tiled wall slashed vertically, like the canvases of Lucio Fontana. However, instead of revealing empty voids, Varejão’s canvas bleeds from its deep gashes, creating an equivalence with the human body by drawing on the Baroque tradition of painting livid flesh. For Varejão, flesh is a symbolic tool, infusing the ordinary with an inherent eroticism to stir both attraction and repulsion. It sits beneath and between the tiled surfaces of her ruínas de charque (jerked beef ruins), wall and floor sculptures whose titles refer to real locations in Portugal, Brazil, and Italy. In Rome Meat Ruin (2016), sections of pale yellow, blue, and white tiles meet along a straight, towering corner fragment, only to erupt into masses of deep red viscera. And in Açougue Song (2000), chunks of meat are strung across the canvas, entirely coated in a crackled white monochrome effect inspired by the morphologies of Song dynasty glazed ceramics.

These surface fractures become deeper, verging on geological, in Varejão’s Azulejão (“big tile”) paintings, made by applying a thick layer of viscous plaster to canvas and allowing it to dry naturally over a long period of time. Ongoing since their first iteration in 1988, the paintings are based on the traditional square glazed terracotta tiles (azulejos) that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese national art since the Middle Ages. Absorbing influences from Moorish artisans, Italian Renaissance painting, Chinese porcelain, and Dutch décor, the azulejo is a metaphor for the mixing of cultures, whether by force or by desire. Previously, Varejão has arranged her paintings in vast grids, echoing the traditional use of the azulejo in architecture, but with visible disruptions to the narrative schemes; or she has created large individual works whose images—whether a geometric pattern, sinuous flourish, or figurative motif—move towards abstraction. With their open cracked surfaces, her most recent monochromes—each a variation of porcelain “white”—are as seismic as they are sublime.

During Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Transbarroco, Varejão’s only multichannel video installation to date, will also be on view for the first time in the United States, following recent presentations in Brazil, Portugal, and Italy. This compelling work, shot on location in Brazil, captures in sweeping takes specific details of noted Baroque church interiors that relate the story of cultural exchange and assimilation, underscored by an ambient sound collage intercut with recitations of key writings on Brazilian identity.