Adriana Varejão

Marta Gnyp: I heard that you don’t like when people call you a Latin American artist because you don’t agree that something like Latin American art exists.

Adriana Varejão: At the time I said that, I was more centered in a cosmopolitan vision of art. I was afraid that assuming a “Latin American”identity would label me in a depreciative way and connect me with the colonial past, since that term was forged by the conqueror. More recently, I have changed my mind.

MG: What made you change your mind?

AV: I have acquired a kind of historical awareness. It became clear to me that the history of Latin America didn’t begin with the conquest of America. I started to identify myself with this land, with its ancestry and also with its pulsating multiculturalism. Latin America’s greatest wealth comes from it being a mixture of so many things simultaneously, this territory-microcosm where so many peoples and cultures coexist. I recognize in my work some striking and fundamental ideas that made me identify myself as Latin American. One of them is that the Latin American Baroque is a field of expression for a marginal discourse, the space of the mestizo, the space of transculturation. I have gradually changed my mind in a way that my ideal of a cosmopolitan and emancipated individual was replaced by the experience of the encounter and by the mixture that is common to these multiple peoples and cultures.

MG: You accepted yourself as a Latin American artist!

AV: Exactly. One aspect that helped me to recognize this identity was the Latin American Baroque, especially after reading works by the Cuban author José Lezama Lima.

MG: What was so special about his approach to Baroque?

AV: The European Baroque was the art of the Counter-Reformation, and Lezama’s approach interpreted the Latin Baroque as the art of the “Counter-Conquest.” The way the native peoples and the peoples from the African diaspora looked at the Christs and saints reflected the vision of their ancestry rooted in the past, across many centuries or even millennia. This ambiguous view will be expressed in the field of the visual representation of the Latin Baroque in several ways, subverting its European original model.

MG: You work with the past, but you interpret it differently and change it to your own advantage?

AV: Actually, I always ask myself what “the past” is. I understand the past as a construction based in the present moment. Thinking like that, each present writes the past in a different way. Just as each present creates its own versions of future. I work operating new ways of seeing, which are more related to think about history from different points of view, not just from the dominants’ point of view.

MG: Baroque was originally related to the Catholic Church that made it to their visual propaganda language. How did the indigenous people adopt Baroque for their own use?

AV: I think there was a search for the purpose and meaning of those signs, permeated, of course, by the tension between the Iberians in confrontation with the natives and the African diaspora. In my work, I try to approach these strategies of cultural appropriation and to promote a re-contextualization of values acquired through indoctrination, in search for emancipation. Ironically, the Baroque was not very effective as a colonization instrument. Its visual form is so vast, so porous, dynamic and permeable, that instead of colonizing, it was often colonized, in the New World. The workers and artisans who built and decorated the churches used to incorporate their own vocabulary. This is the space of mulattos and marginalized, such as the mestizo genius Antonio Francisco Lisboa, known as “Aleijadinho,” who has molded churches in Minas Gerais, in Brazil, and of indigenous painting masters from Cuzco, Quito and Potosí schools in Peru and Bolivia. This is a tradition I feel connected with, I mean, if we can ever call it a “tradition.” Maybe it’s a tradition of mixing.

MG: Because you understand the images? Or because as Brazilian you are part of this visual tradition?

AV: It’s funny, because many times I see in Brazilian and Latin American art an attempt to establish a more rational model, from modernism to concrete art. But I have always identified myself more with the voluptuous, sensual, ambiguous, and twisted discourse of the Baroque. I like the idea of making parody and distortion, mixing signs to change the meaning of the message and subverting the model. For instance, I many times refer to Portuguese tiles in my work. The tile was brought to Brazil by the Portuguese colonizer. It carries an encounter of many cultures in its own history – Arabic, Chinese, European. My concept is not to tell about the Age of Exploration itself, but I make use of some of its historical elements, such as tiles, maps, in order to re-signify them. The transcultural reshaping of the Baroque in Latin America can be interpreted as a subversive, anti-colonial strategy.

MG: You started to work with this idea already in 1988 as a very young girl . . .

AV: My paintings dealing with parodies and historical references date from the beginning of the 1990s, but of course both my works and my ideas have matured and developed over time.

MG: In the meantime, your tile works have become a kind of your signature: very beautiful, smart, diverse. Did it feel like a breaking moment when you made your first tile painting?

AV: The tile appeared in my work while I was flirting with Baroque themes, in the late 1980s. It bears a strong mark of Portuguese coloni zation, being a great repository for many histories and signs around the Baroque. Then it became a recurring theme in many of my further works, but this was happening gradually.

MG: The tiles have had such a huge history. Holland has been associated with blue and white tiles for so long that they have become a part of the Dutch identity, but the Dutch started a production of the tiles only after they had seen them in China. The Portuguese had taken a part of them from the Dutch.

AV: Yes, absolutely. Also, we can’t forget Moorish influence in that history as well.

MG: How did you go to work? Did you choose specific tiles? Did you photograph them? Or are they based on your imagination?

AV: I always work with specific tiles. Sometimes I use an entire image, at other times I enlarge small details, but always starting from existing tiles. I have a huge array of tile references, with more than 5,000 images in my files so far.

MG: Were the tiles coming from Brazil, or from different destinations?

AV: They can be found both in Portugal and in Brazil, in historical buildings and churches. The tiles we see in Brazil have been imported from Portugal. In Mexico, differently, the tiles called Talavera used to be produced by local artisans. I also have a large archive of Talavera images as well as of Islamic heritage tiles and ceramics in general.

MG: Is there any connection between your tile paintings and your big paintings in which you used plaster with the cracks on the surface?

AV: In the beginning, I was interested in tiles and in the routes that you just described: from China to Europe, from Africa to Europe . . . Even the word azulejo (tile in Portuguese) comes from zuleica, which is an Arabic term that means “polished stone.” Investigating the routes of the Portuguese traders, China became my focus since, apart from India, Africa and America, the Portuguese also set a colony in China (Macau). Studying Chinese ceramic tradition, I came across Chinese pottery, the so-called Celadon from Song dynasty, from the 11th century. This ceramics has fascinated me with its glaze of green, gray and blue colors and cracks on the surface.

MG: Then the idea of the crack paintings was born . . .

AV: I was totally in love with Song ceramics. I was fascinated by this idea of cracks that had originally been a mistake, but were then incorporated as a style. I used to apply plaster on the canvases to make the surface smoother. When I noticed that this caused some cracks on the surface, I decided to increase the amount of material, and then the cracks became more radical. That was the beginning of a process that culminated in those big cracked paintings that you mentioned earlier.

MG: Do you allow chance in the making of the cracks? Do you let it dry and during the process you see the cracks organically appearing?

AV: Yes, exactly. I normally prepare many works and observe their drying process. I have no control over how they will crack. If a nice cracked surface comes up, I move on with the work. But sometimes they may crack in a bad way.

MG: If you don’t like it, you create another one?

AV: Yes. I can cause some variations creating either a thicker or a thinner surface. I can somehow try to control it, but in the end it is nature’s invisible hand that makes them. It’s funny because the cracks also remind me of Chinese pictograms. Sometimes I can see a bird or a man with open hands and many other things, and in a way this is how I happen to choose them.

MG: Does the process of drying take a lot of time?

AV: Yes, depending on the weather, they can take until three weeks to get dry. My studio, in Rio de Janeiro, is very close to the Tijuca Forest, a very beautiful but quite humid place. This is a tropical rainforest forest in the city of Rio; the humidity can reach 80% or more. Sometimes, a work gets fungus, so that I have to throw it away and start it again.

MG: You started the azulejos concept in 1988, and you have been continuing it until today. As you described, they are loaded with meanings, which seems to be a perfect symbolic trope to work with. You claimed this symbolic territory which the tiles represent but also, from the visual point of view, they have also become your brand.

AV: I use a vast and varied inventory of visual references in my work, and undoubtedly, the azulejos are a very important vehicle for my investigations. I have been appropriating them for a long time and in many different ways. The azulejo is one of the foundational elements of Brazilian identity. It is an element of our colonial past, brought by the Portuguese. Sometimes, I make parodies of Portuguese Baroque tiles panels and change their meaning through crossing unofficial narratives, such as in the Entrance Figures or in Proposal for a Catechesis, for instance. Other times I treat the tiles as a skin that covers the carnality or a cut, as it happens in the series of Tongues and Incisions. In Azulejões (big tiles), I try to physically recreate the object azulejo, enlarging it in scale, and I get more focused on painting and composition issues, being inspired by both Portuguese Baroque tiles and Song dynasty ceramics. In the Sauna series, on its turn, the tiles are presented as a minimalist grid so that composition, color nuances and perspective appear.

MG: When and why did you become so aware of the post-colonial heritage and your relationship to it?

AV: In the early 1990s I started reading a lot about history and sociology, and these readings inspired to a great extent my work. I was interested in showing and placing myself accordingly to the point of view of the colonizer, appropriating his repertoire so that, from that place, I could make a twist that would also show him to us from the inside out. An emblematic moment was in 1992 when I painted a work called Map of Lopo Homem, which was based on a Portuguese map from 1500s. In my painting, there is a wound in the middle of the map. Part of this wound has been sutured in the work, making it evident – or more evident – that another part of the wound was still open.

Read the full interview in the book.