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Gagosian Quarterly

September 27, 2016

Adriana Varejão:Azulejão

One of Brazil’s most renowned living artists, Adriana Varejão is perhaps best known for her Azulejão or “big tile” paintings. These highly inventive works, in plaster and oil paint on canvas, refer to azulejos, the distinctive blue-and-white painted terracotta tiles whose complex provenance connects Brazil with Portugal through colonization and trade. Gagosian director Louise Neri discusses the evolution of the series with Adriana Varejão.

Adriana Varejão, Azulejão (Doric), 2016, oil on plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)

Adriana Varejão, Azulejão (Doric), 2016, oil on plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)

Louise Neri

Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, working with artists and developing exhibitions, editorial projects, and communications across the global platform. A former editor of Parkett magazine, she has authored and edited many books and articles on contemporary art. Beyond the exhibitions she has organized for Gagosian, she cocurated the 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 1998 São Paulo Bienal, among numerous international projects.

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LOUISE NERIYour Azulejão or “big tile” paintings are unique in the history of contemporary art. How did they evolve?

ADRIANA VAREJÃOFor many years, I have been deeply fascinated by the traditional blue and white tiles that decorate religious and secular historical buildings all over Portugal and Brazil. I wanted to reflect on this in my work as an artist. The tiles themselves prompted me to think about how to give my paintings an extreme physicality. I began by using thick layers of oil paint, then adding mass to the surface to simulate the quality of a ceramic tile.

LNAre there other inspirations beyond the azulejos?

AVIn studying Chinese Song pottery of the eleventh century, I became fascinated by its characteristic surface cracks and the related philosophy. It is in these cracks that Chinese writing actually originates. It was oracular; at first people tried to codify the cracks in turtle shells. This is how the first Chinese pictograms came about. An entire aesthetic evolved from reading meaning into cracks, slowly becoming its own culture.

Inspired by this, I began by using thick layers of oil paint, then I started adding mass to simulate the quality of a cracked tile, working with slow-drying plaster and experimenting over time to achieve a cracked surface.

LNIn your paintings, the cracks in a tile become something very physical, almost geological.

AVYes, I developed this elaborate process of construction to provoke incidents, mapping the passage of time.

LNHow long does it take for the surface to dry?

AVUp to one month. And I never know exactly how the surface will crack. It is fascinating, like the hand of an invisible artist at work—the same hand that makes the lines in your hand, the roots of the trees, lightning in the sky.

LNAnd then what?

AVWhen I achieve a very good cracked surface, I need to find the right image to use with it. It is in the empty spaces between these cracks where I can work with images or figures.

Adriana Varejão: Azulejão

Installation view, Adriana Varejão: Azulejão, Gagosian, Rome, October 1, 2016–January 14, 2017

LNSo it’s a bit like film montage?

AVIt’s a natural order (process) in dialogue with a cultural or an artificial order (images). Two different “bodies” occupying the same space—the internal surfaces in ochre with the blue-and-white painted surface; or, in the case of my sculptures, the gridded surface that simulates tiles with the inner “flesh.”

LNAnd so once you have the ground of the painting prepared, what is the next step?

AVI have to choose the image. In my constant and ongoing research in Portugal and Brazil on azulejos, working with the same photographer over many years, Vicente de Mello, I visit churches and architectural sites, or consult repertories of tile fragments. Over fifteen years, I have amassed a vast archive of tile images. In the case of this exhibition, I chose each image for its abstract qualities. It is important to remember that, originally, each tile is a small fragment of a much larger representational scene.

LNAre the visual references of tile details that you worked from for the Rome paintings all from the same historical period and place?

AVThey range from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, and all of them are Portuguese.

LNPreviously, you made an analogy to music in saying that you can never interpret a single visual reference the same way twice. What did you mean by that?

AVI was speaking specifically about João Gilberto, one of Brazil’s greatest musicians and composers who almost never made any original songs; instead he recomposed existing songs in his own way, in a sort of lapidary process. In this case, the act of interpretation is also an act of composing.

From Gilberto’s example, I asked myself why should I invent new images when there are so many in the world? I don’t have to create more. My strategy is to select existing images and recreate them. And I prefer this as a way of engaging history, of finding images and picking up fragments.

LNSo there is a constant editing process at work. . .

AVYes, it’s all about the fragment.

Adriana Varejão: Azulejão

Adriana Varejão, Monocromo Roma II, 2016, oil on plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)

LNMost ancient Greek philosophy survives only in fragments, as phrases or sentences. An entire philosophical universe can be generated from a single phrase.

AVThe fragment is an open structure. With the works for the Rome exhibition, the images are vital precisely because they are not complete; movement continues. In the beginning, I used to choose the fragment to build a different structure. In Celacanto Provoca Maremoto, a huge immersive installation comprising 184 paintings, I deconstructed and dislocated images in order to construct again, within the formal structure of the grid, to give rhythm to the composition.

LNThe latest Azulejão paintings are 180 centimeters squared, the largest single tile paintings that you have ever made.

AVYes, I always have to create a relation between body and space. It is clear that the viewer has to construct much more for him or herself in the empty space that surrounds these paintings.

LNWhat does this increase in scale mean for you?

AVAs in the original source—the small tile—my brushstroke has to appear spontaneous, as if I were painting quickly, with very few brushstrokes.

LNCan’t you just use bigger brushes?

AVI have tried, but it doesn’t achieve the necessary effect. Even when I appear to be working freely and gesturally, I am not. The apparent spontaneity is simulated. So my whole process and its effects are totally controlled and totally artificial.

Artwork © Adriana Varejão; Adriana Varejão: Azulejão, Gagosian Rome, October 1, 2016–January 14, 2017

Cover of the book Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now: dark blue with orange geometric lettering

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

To celebrate the publication of Phaidon’s new, expansive survey, we share an excerpt from Raphael Fonseca’s introduction and a few of the more than three hundred artists featured.

Image of Adriana Varejão in her studio

Adriana Varejão Selects

To coincide with the release of the first English-language monograph on the career of Adriana Varejão—in which her diverse body of work is explored in depth, from her earliest paintings in the 1990s to her most recent multimedia installations—the artist has curated a selection of films as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the theater and online. The program features cinema exploring themes of eroticism, excess, and science-fiction fatalism.

Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006), on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021

The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.

Installation view, Adriana Varejão: Talavera, Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, May 3–June 26, 2021. Photo: Rob McKeever

Adriana Varejão: For a Poetics of Difference

Curator Luisa Duarte considers the artist’s oeuvre, writing on Varejão’s active engagement with theories of difference, as well as the cultural specters of the past.

Adriana Varejão: In the Studio

Work in Progress
Adriana Varejão: In the Studio

Join Adriana Varejão at her studio in Rio de Janeiro as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition at Gagosian in New York. She speaks about the inspirations for her “tile” paintings, from Portuguese azulejos to the Brazilian Baroque to the Talavera ceramic tradition of Mexico, and reveals for the first time her unique process for creating these works.

Andrea Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, c. 1690, oil on canvas, 39 × 54 inches (99 × 137 cm), Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, Italy.

For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.

Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.

Adriana Varejão: Transbarroco

Adriana Varejão: Transbarroco

From October 19 to 21, 2017, Adriana Varejão’s video installation Transbarroco (2014) played across the façade and in the central courtyard of the historic John Sowden House, designed by Lloyd Wright in 1926.

Adriana Varejão: Interiors

Adriana Varejão: Interiors

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explores themes that are central to the artist’s oeuvre.

Self portrait of Francesca Woodman, she stands against a wall holding pieces of ripped wallpaper in front of her face and legs

Francesca Woodman

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

self portrait by Jamian Juliano-Villani

Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson

Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

portrait of Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day

Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.

Black and white portrait of Katherine Dunham leaping in the air

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955

Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.