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Lot Essay
‘Flesh is first connected with the idea of eroticism, I think, which is found in the Baroque’, she has explained. ‘It’s the space of abundance and excess based on pleasure and lust. For me, flesh is a metaphor for Baroque wood carving, covered all over in gold. Pure voluptuous extravagance’ (A. Varejão, quoted in H. Kelmachter, ‘Echo Chamber’, Adriana Varejão, Chambre d’échos Echo Chamber, exh. cat., Cartier Foundation, Paris, 2005, p. 85).
Transcending the boundary between painting and sculpture, Adriana Varejão’s Ruina de Charque Ipanema (Jerked Beef Ruin Ipanema) confronts the fractured history of her native Brazil. A pristine tiled exterior is stripped away to reveal an underlying crimson expanse of flesh, recalling the ornate Baroque aesthetic imported by the seventeenth-century conquistadors, yet inspired by one of Brazil’s most humble staple foods – beef jerky. Executed in 2001, the work is part of the Ruina de Charque series that occupied the artist’s output between 2000 and 2004, and which fully inaugurate her celebrated practice of three-dimensional painting. Conceived as contemporary architectural ruins, the works from this series weave together social, cultural and artistic history. Combining the sensuous filigree of the Baroque with visceral allusions to flesh and bone, the Ruina de Charque works draw a provocative parallel between the violence of Brazil’s colonial past and the ornamental European aesthetic that accompanied it. Like a totemic memorial, Ruina de Charque Ipanema is a spiritual tribute to the atrocities embedded within the very fabric of Brazil’s cultural and architectural landscape. The artist has received critical acclaim for her incisive and visionary practice, most recently showcased in a major solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2012.
Varejão’s fascination with the Baroque stems from her visit to a church in the former colonial mining town of Ouro Preto during her early twenties. As the artist recalls, ‘When I arrived in Ouro Preto I was astounded, in ecstasy … It all seemed so magical. I went to sleep and when I woke up I went out walking alone, climbing the cobbled steps of Ouro Preto. That was the day I entered a baroque church for the first time in my life, Antonio Dias’ Nossa Senhora da Conceição. I ended up missing the opening of the National Salon. I visited all the churches in the City, repeatedly, walking barefoot in the streets … for me, it was all about the material, and the experiences, the romance, the pleasure, the sensuality … it’s squeezed in the cracks, between the stones, in the veins of the wood’ (A. Varejão, quoted in Adriana Varejão: Histórias às margens, exh. cat., Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2013, pp. 237-239). The multi-sensory transcendence of this formative experience is exquisitely brought to life in the quivering, looping, swirling patterns inscribed in Varejão’s sculpted flesh, drawing the viewer into its opulent splendour. For Varejão, the sensual materiality of flesh itself is quintessentially Baroque in nature. ‘Flesh is first connected with the idea of eroticism, I think, which is found in the Baroque’, she has explained. ‘It’s the space of abundance and excess based on pleasure and lust. For me, flesh is a metaphor for Baroque wood carving, covered all over in gold. Pure voluptuous extravagance’ (A. Varejão, quoted in H. Kelmachter, ‘Echo Chamber’, Adriana Varejão, Chambre d’échos Echo Chamber, exh. cat., Cartier Foundation, Paris, 2005, p. 85).
Architectural ruins have been one of Varejão’s most important sources of inspiration since she emerged as an artist in the early 1990s, and her early work draws inspiration from the decorative terracotta tiles, or azulejos, that the Portuguese imported to colonial Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Imagery from these tiles – still visible today in churches and public buildings – has been subjected to a variety of treatments throughout Varejão’s oeuvre: spliced and recombined in her early paintings, and violently wrenched apart by meat-like protrusions in the series of Linguas (Tongues) that predate and inform the Ruina de Charque works. In the present example, however, the azulejos have been replaced with clean white tiles that throw the sinuous crimson interior into stark relief. Rather than simply alluding to the walls they once adorned, here the tiles sit atop a real wall-like edifice that is construed as a fragmented ruin itself. Beef jerky – strips of salted dried meat that constitute a staple in the poorest of Brazilian communities – becomes a symbol for the atrocities of colonisation, forming glistening compact layers that writhe within the very structure of the wall itself. Rendered here with all the glorious ornate intricacies of the Baroque, Varejão imbues her work with irony and pathos, navigating seamlessly between violence and beauty.
Transcending the boundary between painting and sculpture, Adriana Varejão’s Ruina de Charque Ipanema (Jerked Beef Ruin Ipanema) confronts the fractured history of her native Brazil. A pristine tiled exterior is stripped away to reveal an underlying crimson expanse of flesh, recalling the ornate Baroque aesthetic imported by the seventeenth-century conquistadors, yet inspired by one of Brazil’s most humble staple foods – beef jerky. Executed in 2001, the work is part of the Ruina de Charque series that occupied the artist’s output between 2000 and 2004, and which fully inaugurate her celebrated practice of three-dimensional painting. Conceived as contemporary architectural ruins, the works from this series weave together social, cultural and artistic history. Combining the sensuous filigree of the Baroque with visceral allusions to flesh and bone, the Ruina de Charque works draw a provocative parallel between the violence of Brazil’s colonial past and the ornamental European aesthetic that accompanied it. Like a totemic memorial, Ruina de Charque Ipanema is a spiritual tribute to the atrocities embedded within the very fabric of Brazil’s cultural and architectural landscape. The artist has received critical acclaim for her incisive and visionary practice, most recently showcased in a major solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2012.
Varejão’s fascination with the Baroque stems from her visit to a church in the former colonial mining town of Ouro Preto during her early twenties. As the artist recalls, ‘When I arrived in Ouro Preto I was astounded, in ecstasy … It all seemed so magical. I went to sleep and when I woke up I went out walking alone, climbing the cobbled steps of Ouro Preto. That was the day I entered a baroque church for the first time in my life, Antonio Dias’ Nossa Senhora da Conceição. I ended up missing the opening of the National Salon. I visited all the churches in the City, repeatedly, walking barefoot in the streets … for me, it was all about the material, and the experiences, the romance, the pleasure, the sensuality … it’s squeezed in the cracks, between the stones, in the veins of the wood’ (A. Varejão, quoted in Adriana Varejão: Histórias às margens, exh. cat., Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2013, pp. 237-239). The multi-sensory transcendence of this formative experience is exquisitely brought to life in the quivering, looping, swirling patterns inscribed in Varejão’s sculpted flesh, drawing the viewer into its opulent splendour. For Varejão, the sensual materiality of flesh itself is quintessentially Baroque in nature. ‘Flesh is first connected with the idea of eroticism, I think, which is found in the Baroque’, she has explained. ‘It’s the space of abundance and excess based on pleasure and lust. For me, flesh is a metaphor for Baroque wood carving, covered all over in gold. Pure voluptuous extravagance’ (A. Varejão, quoted in H. Kelmachter, ‘Echo Chamber’, Adriana Varejão, Chambre d’échos Echo Chamber, exh. cat., Cartier Foundation, Paris, 2005, p. 85).
Architectural ruins have been one of Varejão’s most important sources of inspiration since she emerged as an artist in the early 1990s, and her early work draws inspiration from the decorative terracotta tiles, or azulejos, that the Portuguese imported to colonial Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Imagery from these tiles – still visible today in churches and public buildings – has been subjected to a variety of treatments throughout Varejão’s oeuvre: spliced and recombined in her early paintings, and violently wrenched apart by meat-like protrusions in the series of Linguas (Tongues) that predate and inform the Ruina de Charque works. In the present example, however, the azulejos have been replaced with clean white tiles that throw the sinuous crimson interior into stark relief. Rather than simply alluding to the walls they once adorned, here the tiles sit atop a real wall-like edifice that is construed as a fragmented ruin itself. Beef jerky – strips of salted dried meat that constitute a staple in the poorest of Brazilian communities – becomes a symbol for the atrocities of colonisation, forming glistening compact layers that writhe within the very structure of the wall itself. Rendered here with all the glorious ornate intricacies of the Baroque, Varejão imbues her work with irony and pathos, navigating seamlessly between violence and beauty.