The fine color gradations that enliven the apparent chromatic uniformity of Adriana Varejão’s Ruina de charque—Portugal (Jerked-beef ruin—Portugal; all works 2001), or the delicate mesh that furrows its surface, might seem to evoke the traditions of Minimalist or monochrome painting. It is thus tempting to discuss the Brazilian artist’s work in terms of the history of modernism and the possible significance of its survival. A more attentive look, however, shows us that this is not a strict exercise in abstract painting, but rather the representation of a surface clad in tiles. The painting, when it becomes a duplicate of the wall (or of the floor, as we see in another work in the series, Ruina de charque-Porto), creates a direct confrontation with the space that houses it and raises architectural issues, becoming something more like an installation.
In her recent exhibitions “Azulejão” (Big tile) in Rio de Janeiro and “Azuljões” (Big tiles) in São Paulo, Varejão lined the gallery walls with canvases that functioned as enlargements of the panels of a tiled wall. Their motifs were variations on those of traditional Portuguese tile work, which had considerable architectural and religious importance in the era of the colonization of Brazil. In effect, the artist made a new wall and a new space inside the gallery. The same thing happened here with Parede (Wall), in which eighteen superimposed canvases of varying sizes gave the illusion of a simple two-dimensional painting on one flat support, thus playing with the function of the wall in an even more complex manner.
In Jerked-Beef Ruin—Portugal, the tile-lined space that Varejão’s painting evokes is not a virtual space, neutral, separate from the world. It brings to mind concrete situations: a butcher shop, a bar, a kitchen, a bathroom, or a hospital; social space, domestic space, intimate space—spaces in which the body must be contained and protected, just as tiles protect a wall, which in turn defines the structure of a building. The objective would be to keep the body under cover, but Varejão suggests that it is impossible to hide the body. The lateral edge of the painted surfaces takes the form of a large mass of meat that overflows the limits of the painting, squashed between the front surface of the painting and the wall or floor. The work emerges as an immense, monstrous sandwich of meat between two walls, one real, the other painted. The extraordinary presence of this mass of meat is the real point of these works, the moment when our astonishment and our excitement are registered, an intersection of scandal and fascination. What is this meat? Where does it come from, and what is it doing here?
“Charque,” according to the dictionary, means “a large slab of meat, salted, and sun-dried.” Meat is the flesh of a body. In Varejão’s works, reference to stereotypical representations of the body often takes the form of a deconstruction of colonialist representations of subjugated peoples. In that sense, the meat is also, at a metaphorical level, the flesh of a specific social community: the subjugated populations of colonial and contemporary Brazil, in whose cultural forms bodily expression plays a prominent role (e.g., dance, music, Carnival). The presence of the flesh thus becomes the expression of the breadth of a history that can no longer be ignored, as well as of the irreducibility of personal experience.
—Alexandre Melo
Translated from Portugese by Clifford Landers.
