Qing ci Song (Celadon Song)

A seismic network of cracks ruptures the pristine blue-green surface of Adriana Varejão’s Qing ci Song (Celadon Song) (2018), revealing glimpses of visceral deep red beneath. Somewhere between sculpture and painting, the work was created using oil paint and lime plaster. Varejão lets the viscous plaster dry to form its own natural craquelure—which ranges here from a delicate filigree of crazing at the outer edges to deep, scalloped fissures at the centre—before applying colour. A subtle version of this texture had appeared since the late 1980s in the artist’s Azulejão series, which explore Brazil’s layered aesthetic and cultural histories through monumental versions of azulejos: the glazed blue-and-white terracotta tiles that were popular among Portuguese colonisers and have since become identified with Brazil. On a 1992 visit to China, Varejão was struck by the distinctive craquelure of 11^th-13^th-century Song Dynasty pottery, and began to purposely incorporate dramatic cracks into her work. The present work stems from a series of fissured monochromes that look back to this inspiration: ‘Qing ci’ is the Chinese term for the variable blue-green tone, known in the West as celadon, that is a defining feature of Song ceramics.

Born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, where she still lives and works today, Varejão is one of Brazil’s most important contemporary artists. Earlier this year she was the subject of a monumental retrospective at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, which surveyed the rich and varied practice she has developed over the past four decades. Untangling the complexities of aesthetic tradition in her own country and beyond, she tackles themes of colonialism, violence and racial identity through a piercing and playful lens. The notion of the Baroque, with its theatrical conflation of beauty and the grotesque, is a guiding theme: often almost like stage-sets or scenery in their physical presence, many of Varejão’s works feature traditionally attractive, decorative or rational surfaces slashed or ruptured to reveal visceral, fleshy interiors. Her Ruinas de charque (Jerked Beef Ruins), a series of large-scale sculptures begun in 1999, simulate entrails bursting from within architectural fragments of modernist tilework. She is influenced by theories of mestizaje—or ‘miscegenation’, a term for the mixing of ancestries—and by the anthropophagic ideas of Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade, who urged artists to ‘cannibalise’, rather than reject, cultural elements of their country’s colonisers. Varejão’s interest in the azulejo, which bears influences from Chinese porcelain, Moorish art, Italian Renaissance painting and the Dutch Golden Age, is emblematic in this respect.

In Qing ci Song, Varejão’s excavations of historical violence are less bodily and explicit, and her disruption of the austere, monochrome surface takes on a poetic beauty. In the craquelure’s delicate, radial network of friable lines, Varejão sees an image of culture’s complex, shifting and often surprising interconnections—such as the influence of Chinese ceramics upon Portuguese tiles via trade routes into Holland, and the Chinese elements she has discovered in the decoration of some of Brazil’s high-Baroque churches. ‘The cracks’, she says, ‘give some physicality to the work … I like that it looks like a rhizome; like tree branches or veins in your hands. There is a fragility and unpredictability; the craquelure occurs according to nature’s innate intelligence. This also alludes to instability and how culture functions as a rhizome with many points touching each other and existing at the same time’ (A. Varejão quoted in R. Mitchell, ‘Adriana Varejão Looks Beneath The Surface’, Ocula, 1 June 2021).