Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Adriana Varej\u00e3o\u2019s studio, in the lush, fancy environs of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Jardim Bot\u00e2nico neighbourhood, is built around a courtyard. The main space for making art is a two-storey block of the tropical modernist style. Facing it is the artist\u2019s former house, now offices and a yoga studio her team uses after a laborious day making the large-scale \u201ccracked surface\u201d paintings Varej\u00e3o has become known for. As I arrive, on the studio side, the artist \u2014 dressed casually in a purple vest and baggy shorts \u2014 is folding open a vast cantilenliaever door, opening up the entire upper floor to the midday sun.This spring, Varej\u00e3o has solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York \u2014 only the second contemporary artist to do so \u2014 and Gagosian in Athens, making a new series of \u201cplates\u201d for both, her vast highly decorated concave wall works.\u00a0Meanwhile, she is curating an exhibition of her older work alongside that of the late Paula Rego at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon. It is this that is causing the most stress. \u201cIt is nice just to be making new work, because being a curator involves so much organisation: finding out where all the old works are, getting hold of the Paula Regos,\u201d she says, gently pushing away Lua, her dog, a nine-year-old former beach stray.Born in 1964, the daughter of an air force pilot and a hospital nutritionist, Varej\u00e3o studied at the Parque Lage art school in Rio. A trip to Ouro Preto in 1986, a colonial mining town in the state of Minas Gerais, brought an \u201cepiphany\u201d, the artist awed by the baroque churches, in which excess mingled with symbols of death and decay \u2014 an influence on Varej\u00e3o to this day.Rego was never a reference for Varej\u00e3o until an exhibition of the Portuguese artist at Pinacoteca in S\u00e3o Paulo in 2011. \u201cI said \u2018wow\u2019 to myself. \u2018Who is this furious woman?\u2019\u201d A studio visit followed. \u201cShe was full of stories. Her studio was amazing because she built her compositions as scenery first, which she painted after. All the figures were made out of papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9. The place was like a theatre set.\u201d They agreed to make a show together, but in 2022 Rego died, leaving Varej\u00e3o to carry the exhibition alone. \u201cPaula plays psychological games with her work, they have this subtle tension. The violence in my work is not so subliminal,\u201d she says of the pairing. \u201cPaula shows violence in the domestic space, in spaces of intimacy; my violence is a social violence.\u201dIn response to Portugal\u2019s rejection of legalised abortion in a 1998 referendum, Rego made a series of works depicting backstreet clinics, emotionally intense but without being explicit \u2014 the artist\u2019s fury was conveyed just through the expressions of the women she depicted. In the Gulbenkian exhibition Varej\u00e3o will pair Rego\u2019s \u201cTriptych\u201d (1998) \u2014 three women, including a girl in school uniform, lying in sparse grubby rooms \u2014 with her own, more visceral installation \u201cExtirpation of Evil by Incision\u201d (1994). Here, a real hospital trolley sits in front of a canvas in which a line painting of demons and the figure of death has been obliterated by a gory incision into the canvas. \u201cI had started to study meat in the market or at the butchers,\u201d Varej\u00e3o notes.\u00a0Female reproductive rights are not the only issue Varej\u00e3o is keen to tackle. \u201cIt\u2019s very important for me to make this show in Portugal, because my work, especially in the \u201990s, was about colonisation, new histories, histories that were not the official narrative. In Brazil we are talking about that now, but in Portugal they still do not reflect on this. In Portugal you hear people say, \u2018Portugal isn\u2019t a racist country, we are not racists.\u2019 They still have no historical conscience.\u201d Varej\u00e3o, animated now, tells how she visited the Museu do Tesouro Real in Lisbon, an institution that opened in 2022 to show off the state treasures including gold and diamonds from Brazil. \u201cIf the texts that were in that museum were displayed in Brazil that place would be cancelled.\u201d\u00a0In the Gulbenkian show is a shocking work from Varej\u00e3o\u2019s early era, \u201cFilho Bastardo II\u201d (1995). The oval painting in oil shows a colonial-era bedroom, the arched doors open to a lush landscape beyond. On a bed a white man in aristocratic dress is shown raping an enslaved woman. Down the centre Varej\u00e3o inserted one of her trademark bloody, fleshy gashes, maximising the sense of horror in the work. \u201cI think it\u2019s still important for the Portuguese to see this violence\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009I\u2019m expecting a reaction, and I hope it will be very loud.\u201d\u00a0She says, however, that she feels it is no longer her place to make a work like \u201cFilho Bastardo II\u201d\u00a0now. \u201cToday in Brazil we have others better placed to talk about colonialism. So my work changed.\u201d\u00a0In the 2000s, Varej\u00e3o left behind oil painting and figuration, and the gashes extended to become cracks. \u201cI fell in love with ceramics from the Song dynasty and I started to read the philosophy behind it all. This is when the cracks in the work first appeared.\u201d A series of large-scale paintings that mimicked baroque azulejos tiles followed, as well as the plates.\u00a0\u201cThey were originally an accident. I didn\u2019t like the texture of the canvas, and so I used to put some plaster and glue to prepare the surface. One time I put in a little bit too much and it cracked, but I liked it. For me it was natural: the lines signified the language of nature, the way a tree root spreads, or a river spreads across the land. This was my big break from the oil painting of the past.\u201d She points to a half-finished work destined for Athens which has a perfectly framed series of spreading cracks, recalling sun-baked earth. \u201cI can\u2019t control them. To get a composition I like for one of the big works, I have to make 200 and choose the one I like best.\u201dVarej\u00e3o\u2019s current work is no longer so explicit in its politics, but she remains interested in questions of identity. The new \u201cplates\u201d, each more than a metre in diameter, which will be shown at the Hispanic Society, show richly detailed scenes from nature on the front, with the back making reference to a variety of global ceramic traditions, including the indigenous art of Marajoara culture.\u201cI wanted to bring various cultures together, so the back of one of the plates is influenced by 15th-century Valencian ceramics that they have in the Hispanic Society collection; then another is Ming Chinese. One is based on Iznik ceramics from the Ottoman Empire,\u201d she says.She was invited to dive into the institution\u2019s collection and pick out objects to sit alongside her own work. \u201cThey don\u2019t have any Marajoara in the collection, so I wanted to include two works that reference that tradition, because it\u2019s Amazonian and it\u2019s pre-Columbian. It speaks to hierarchy, to put something from the region alongside the Ming references.\u201dGiven she is so aware of the decolonial politics that bubbles under so much of Brazil\u2019s art making, I ask whether she\u2019s worried about accusations of cultural appropriation. \u201cMy work comes from the baroque. It is not about one thing, but about pastiche and representation. Mimicry. The baroque has the capacity to absorb cultures, it gives space for individual artisans to incorporate different aesthetics. There is a space for more and more and more.\u201dWhile the piles of books that lie on her table in the studio offer guides to ceramic traditions from China to Turkey, indigenous Brazilian making to pre-Columbian Mexico, her own fantastical, maximalist works go beyond anything documented on their pages. \u201cMy work is an expression of hybridity,\u201d she says, nodding to the library. \u201cWhich is the story of Brazil itself.\u201dTo June 22, hispanicsociety.org; April 11-September 22, gulbenkian.pt; May 15-June 14, gagosian.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Adriana Varej\u00e3o\u2019s studio, in the lush, fancy environs of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Jardim Bot\u00e2nico neighbourhood, is built around a courtyard. The main space for making art is a two-storey block of the tropical modernist style. Facing it is the artist\u2019s former house, now offices<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":263030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-263029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":263031,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263029\/revisions\/263031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}