.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'My painting, in the Sauna series, departs from the conceptual field of references to historical iconography and enters the field of the sensorial. These are timeless environments. But they are figurative works that combine figuration with geometry. They work on questions intrinsic to painting, such as colour, composition, perspective... They are works that converse with architectural space, but in a virtual way. They are projected spaces. I seek inspiration in bars, hammams, pools, slaughterhouses, public restrooms, hospitals' (A. Varejão, quoted in H. Kelmachter, 'Echo Chamber', pp. 79-99, Adriana Varejão, Chambre d'échos Echo Chamber, exh. cat., Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Paris 2005, p. 89).
Painstakingly constructed with a complex, perspectival mesh of lines and tessera-like panels of monochrome, Adriana Varejão's O Sonhador is a large-scale canvas that immerses the viewer in a fictive space; a vertiginous realm with a plunging perspective. Where some of Varejão's works appear to burst from the wall, spilling flesh from their cracked surfaces, in O Sonhador the opposite occurs, as the viewer is instead swallowed into the receding, fictitious vortex of this two-dimensional panel. The pristine linearity of the grids that Varejão has used to conjure this sense of space adds a geometric crispness to this picture that is disrupted only by the sensuous depiction of the distortions caused by the rippling water and by the rounded corners. Despite the almost mathematical precision of this picture, there is also the pervasive sense that something is about to happen, that there is a narrative unfolding or about to unfold around the corner.
O Sonhador was painted in 2006 and forms part of Varejão's series of pictures entitled Saunas and Baths. This was a group of works that had their inception in 2001, after Varejão had stumbled upon a photograph of an interior in Macau in a book on architecture through which she was leafing while in a bookshop in Portugal. The cross-currents of international trade and, in particular, of colonialism had already featured strongly in her works, which often explored the legacy of the Baroque in her native Brazil. But here, standing in a bookshop in Portugal and seeing a plainly-tiled, anonymous interior in Macau, she realised that there was a commonality to her cultural inheritance as a Brazilian and to that of the people of that formerly-Portuguese enclave in China. The azulejos, the tiles which the Portuguese had introduced to Brazil, owed their own appearance to the Portuguese trade relations with China, over which they had long held a monopoly granted by the Pope. Looking at the tiles in Macau, which so closely resembled the functional architecture of Brazil and indeed Portugal, Varejão began to explore other aspects of this cultural to-and-fro by painting the crisp, geometric interiors of the Saunas and Baths. And the more that she painted, the more she discovered these interiors in a range of places that each had their own context and subtext, be it a segregated female hammam in Paris, a slaughterhouse in Brazil or a public bath in Budapest.
On various occasions, Varejão has claimed that her pictures of saunas and baths avoid the overt references to history. She has claimed that, in contrast to the textured works in which viscera appear to spill from the ruptured surfaces, the Saunas and Baths are 'moments of pure painting,' a world apart from the processes employed in creating her installation-like works which often involve three-dimensional effects, rather than the illusion thereof. However, rather than being a mere painterly exercise or indulgence on Varejão's part, the seemingly-inscrutable geometric surface of O Sonhador yields to a number of cultural and historical references in its own right. After all, the saunas and pools that Varejão has taken as her inspiration are places of ritual sanitation, especially in the case of the Parisian hammam. Other tiled interiors are based on slaughterhouses and bars, each bringing its own frame of reference. The concept of imminent violence that is so disquietingly evoked by these too calm interiors is overtly introduced in The Guest, in which a wanton smear of what appears to be blood appears on the tiled floor, a moment of random flow within the controlled lines of the constructed space. In this way, the flesh - and by extension the human body - that features in so many of her works may not be visible in this picture, but remains somehow lurkingly present.
By depicting the cool-seeming interior of O Sonhador, Varejão has made references to violence and to cultural cross-germination. As well as looking at history, at the links between Portugal, Brazil and Macau of the colonial era, she has also invoked post-War cultural history. The water, through which the right-angled rigidity of the tiles has become an ornate mass of ribbon-like forms, echoes the swimming pools painted by David Hockney from the 1960s. Meanwhile, the criss-crossing lines of O Sonhador recall the paintings of the Portuguese artist, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, which themselves conjured abstract visions of receding imaginary spaces that were rooted in her memories of the azulejos that she had known as a child. Similarly, the disruption of the geometric appearance of this picture, which evokes such a strong sense of an interior room yet which largely comprises a mass of lines and of panels of colour makes this a determinedly figurative riposte to the emphatic abstraction of the Brazilian artists of the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements such as Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. In this way, O Sonhador invokes and disrupts the modernist visions that underpinned those movements. Varejão has taken their abstract visual language and rooted it in an emphatically illusionistic interior view, twisting those modernist works to a new purpose that allows her, through the device of this seemingly inscrutable image of a geometric space, to investigate a whole range of cultural legacies and implications, both in Brazil and in the wider modern world.
Painstakingly constructed with a complex, perspectival mesh of lines and tessera-like panels of monochrome, Adriana Varejão's O Sonhador is a large-scale canvas that immerses the viewer in a fictive space; a vertiginous realm with a plunging perspective. Where some of Varejão's works appear to burst from the wall, spilling flesh from their cracked surfaces, in O Sonhador the opposite occurs, as the viewer is instead swallowed into the receding, fictitious vortex of this two-dimensional panel. The pristine linearity of the grids that Varejão has used to conjure this sense of space adds a geometric crispness to this picture that is disrupted only by the sensuous depiction of the distortions caused by the rippling water and by the rounded corners. Despite the almost mathematical precision of this picture, there is also the pervasive sense that something is about to happen, that there is a narrative unfolding or about to unfold around the corner.
O Sonhador was painted in 2006 and forms part of Varejão's series of pictures entitled Saunas and Baths. This was a group of works that had their inception in 2001, after Varejão had stumbled upon a photograph of an interior in Macau in a book on architecture through which she was leafing while in a bookshop in Portugal. The cross-currents of international trade and, in particular, of colonialism had already featured strongly in her works, which often explored the legacy of the Baroque in her native Brazil. But here, standing in a bookshop in Portugal and seeing a plainly-tiled, anonymous interior in Macau, she realised that there was a commonality to her cultural inheritance as a Brazilian and to that of the people of that formerly-Portuguese enclave in China. The azulejos, the tiles which the Portuguese had introduced to Brazil, owed their own appearance to the Portuguese trade relations with China, over which they had long held a monopoly granted by the Pope. Looking at the tiles in Macau, which so closely resembled the functional architecture of Brazil and indeed Portugal, Varejão began to explore other aspects of this cultural to-and-fro by painting the crisp, geometric interiors of the Saunas and Baths. And the more that she painted, the more she discovered these interiors in a range of places that each had their own context and subtext, be it a segregated female hammam in Paris, a slaughterhouse in Brazil or a public bath in Budapest.
On various occasions, Varejão has claimed that her pictures of saunas and baths avoid the overt references to history. She has claimed that, in contrast to the textured works in which viscera appear to spill from the ruptured surfaces, the Saunas and Baths are 'moments of pure painting,' a world apart from the processes employed in creating her installation-like works which often involve three-dimensional effects, rather than the illusion thereof. However, rather than being a mere painterly exercise or indulgence on Varejão's part, the seemingly-inscrutable geometric surface of O Sonhador yields to a number of cultural and historical references in its own right. After all, the saunas and pools that Varejão has taken as her inspiration are places of ritual sanitation, especially in the case of the Parisian hammam. Other tiled interiors are based on slaughterhouses and bars, each bringing its own frame of reference. The concept of imminent violence that is so disquietingly evoked by these too calm interiors is overtly introduced in The Guest, in which a wanton smear of what appears to be blood appears on the tiled floor, a moment of random flow within the controlled lines of the constructed space. In this way, the flesh - and by extension the human body - that features in so many of her works may not be visible in this picture, but remains somehow lurkingly present.
By depicting the cool-seeming interior of O Sonhador, Varejão has made references to violence and to cultural cross-germination. As well as looking at history, at the links between Portugal, Brazil and Macau of the colonial era, she has also invoked post-War cultural history. The water, through which the right-angled rigidity of the tiles has become an ornate mass of ribbon-like forms, echoes the swimming pools painted by David Hockney from the 1960s. Meanwhile, the criss-crossing lines of O Sonhador recall the paintings of the Portuguese artist, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, which themselves conjured abstract visions of receding imaginary spaces that were rooted in her memories of the azulejos that she had known as a child. Similarly, the disruption of the geometric appearance of this picture, which evokes such a strong sense of an interior room yet which largely comprises a mass of lines and of panels of colour makes this a determinedly figurative riposte to the emphatic abstraction of the Brazilian artists of the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements such as Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. In this way, O Sonhador invokes and disrupts the modernist visions that underpinned those movements. Varejão has taken their abstract visual language and rooted it in an emphatically illusionistic interior view, twisting those modernist works to a new purpose that allows her, through the device of this seemingly inscrutable image of a geometric space, to investigate a whole range of cultural legacies and implications, both in Brazil and in the wider modern world.