Adriana Varejão

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2004

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling around the edges of each of the panels. There is very fine cracquelure scattered at the pull margins. There is also some cracquelure located along some of the edges of the slashes. There is a diagonal abrasion in the lower part of the center panel. There are some yellow accretions in the lower part of the center panel. The same accretions are also located to a smaller degree around some of the other slashes in the other panels. These may be inherent to the work and to the artist's working method. There are no signs of restoration under ultraviolet light inspection. There are scattered areas of bright fluorescence around the slashes on each of the panels consistent with the artist's use of medium. Unframed.
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Essential to Adriana Varejão’s oeuvre is the weight of Brazilian history and culture, with an emphasis on the theatricality of the Baroque style, as examined through the lens of modernity. Her works are hybrids of painting, sculpture and installation, layered with overt references to colonialism and the comingled influences of Portuguese and European culture on Brazilian visual culture. Varejão’s most powerful works are supremely violent, echoing the Baroque style that permeated colonial art and architecture in the New World. In Trois Petites Morts from 2003, and other works from this Tongues and Incisions series, Varejão creates pristine tiled surfaces that are marred by bloody slashes. The tiled walls melt with the weight of the carnage that lies behind it, bursting out towards the viewer, with an absolute mastery of trompe l’oeil. The canvases appear to contain living organisms just below the skin, pulsating with life and death.

In 1928, Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade famously coined the term Anthropofagia – a reference to the symbolic process of “cannibalizing” - adapting and synthesizing of cultures and the genesis of something entirely new. Anthropofagia and modernism are intertwined in the 20^th century history of Brazilian artistic production. Varejão explains, “modernity in Brazil is based on this notion of anthropophagy, on the capacity to incorporate foreign ideas and transform them into our own. This notion is linked to the very essence of the Anthropophagic rite, to its symbolic aspect, to the idea of absorbing the Other." (Varejão quoted in Exh. Cat., Adriana Varejão, Chambre d'échos, Paris, 2005, p. 95) In this established tradition, Varejão has cannibalized the Baroque style of the Brazil’s art and produced a work that is at once Baroque and contemporary.

Varejão's use of violence is cathartic, bordering on the erotic. In a deliberate play on Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases, Varejão incises and bursts open three tiled panels in Trois Petites Morts. In the manner of Fontana, Varejão subverts the boundaries of the two dimensional canvas as the picture literally gushes outward, oozing like an open wound. The tiled background evokes both the Portuguese tile designs that adorn the vestiges of colonial spaces in Brazil and the abstraction of Brazilian neo-concretismo movement. Varejão’s Tongues and Incisions series is perhaps the artist’s most celebrated, and works from this series are housed in important collections such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Tate Modern in London. Several works in the series actually reference Fontana in their title. Rather than directly referencing Fontana in Trois Petites Morts, she makes an overt reference to sex and death.

Executed in 2003, Trois Petites Mortes is at once erotic and violent, manifested by the aggressive and bloody slashes, but also by the work’s title.  The term “la petite mort” literally translates into “little death” in French, but colloquially, the term refers to an orgasm, physically describing the release of oxytocin in the brain and metaphorically alluding to the momentary expenditure of one’s life force—hence, a little death. The term implies a release – both physical and metaphysical – a fleeting moment where both agony and pleasure intertwine to become one.

In Trois Petites Morts, the bloodied slashes on the pristine white tiles suggest a violent and erotic engagement. These savage scratches imply a carnal, animalistic impulse, unharnessed and aggressive. We picture fingernails digging into flesh or a knife stabbing and puncturing skin, suggesting lustful desire and passionate, explosive encounters. Upon closer inspection, the layers that make up these three panels begin to unravel and the work adopts an entirely different meaning. Varejão explains: “Flesh is first connected with the idea of eroticism, I think, which is found in the Baroque. It’s the space of abundance and excess based on pleasure and lust. For me, flesh is a metaphor for Baroque woodcut, covered all over in gold. Pure voluptuous extravagance.” (Varejão quoted in Ibid., p. 85) Through these mutilated canvases, Varejão explores the eroticism, excess and theatricality of the Baroque. Varejão has cannibalized and appropriated Fontana’s slashing of the canvas and the excesses of Baroque art to create an entirely unique style. Her sexually charged, lacerated Trois Petites Morts is a cathartic reinterpretation of the past. 'The incisions in my paintings tend to reveal a carnal interior that overflows onto the surface. Through the incision I thrust one side onto the other. That's how body and culture, figure and geometry, sparseness and accumulation, transparency and density, spirituality and visceralness, reason and plastic sensuality blend together in my work.” (Varejão quoted in Ibid, p. 81).