Adriana Varejão

Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Very close inspection reveals a hairline crack to a corner tip approximately 40cm from the centre bottom, which has been stabilised. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Masterfully intertwining pluriform histories within its crocodilian surface, Adriana Varejão’s Untitled is a remarkable example of the artist’s truly global aesthetic. The vocabulary of material, conceptual, stylistic and iconographic references that informs Varejão’s art, much like her native Brazil, confounds so many of our established binaries – personal/universal, occidental/oriental, local/global, historical/modern – to lay bare the absurdity of their construction. Comprising part of the artist’s seminal Seas and Tiles series, other examples of which are held in celebrated international collections such as the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília, and the Tate, London, Untitled uncovers the essential artificiality of culture by bringing new meaning and place to the discipline of painting in our contemporary world. 

In Untitled, far-flung histories converge as China meets Brazil through Varejão’s signature motif of the azulejo tile. These blue-and-white tiles, originally imported from Lisbon, fuse Dutch-Flemish, Moorish, and Chinese origins in their style, their content, and their name, which is derived from an amalgamation of the Portuguese word for blue, azul, and the Arabic for tile, zellij or zuleika. Indeed, the exquisite craquelure and fissions that streak across the present work are immediately redolent of both the sinewy cracks that often adorn Eastern Chinese Song ceramics and the crocodilian surfaces of the azulejo. As such, Untitled declares its own material linkage to the histories of destruction and carnage that the azulejo used to depict in an innovatively painterly fashion.

Bathed in a pale green wash, the present work visually fuses the historic azulejo with the monochrome canvases of minimalism and in doing so imparts a distinctly post-modern and even polymorphous art historical lineage. Meticulously crafted from a unique blend of oil and plaster that is carefully applied to the canvas surface and left to dry, the generative act of creation is discombobulated with that of degeneration and destruction as the work slowly dries to produce Varejão’s iconic cracks and fissures. Indeed, Untitled and the other works from the Seas and Tiles series are the most vigorously forthright of all Varejao’s work in dealing with the hybrid notions that Brazil has come to be known for. As the artist 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” (Adriana Varejão quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Adriana Varejão: Chambre d'Échos, 2005, p. 95).