Adriana Varejão : Carnivorous, Victoria Miro Mayfair

Adriana Varejão’s Fifth solo-show Carnivorous comes Victoria Miro Mayfair, marking her out decisively as one of the galleries’ favourites. Varejão, born and based in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, has rapidly ascended to the top of the contemporary art ladder. Paradoxically she achieves both beauty and vulgarity through material and form, fusing the artistic ornate with crude allusions to the bodily guts and gore.

The Show…

Somewhat ironically, the subject matter of Carnivorous is plant-life. Varejão  has recently been indulging in Botany encyclopaedias and she is fascinated with Brazil’s indigenous fauna-eating flora. One immediately detects through her work that behind the beautiful and exotic is a sense of foreboding.

Keeping within the tradition of her past subjects, the allegory of cracked and ruptured painterly surface returns, implicitly referring to Brazil’s specific historical and cultural identity. The cracks, or the ‘rachadura’ of dry, parched earth refer to the arid farming land of northeast Brazil outside of Rio de Janeiro, where some of the poorest still live and which became a place of refuge and escape for slaves under colonialism. 

Consuming culture …

The theme of meat eating directly relates back to Brazil’s history of cannibalism and specifically the Tupí Indians who inhabited Brazil before its colonisation. Oswald de Andrade wrote about the Tupí’s in his ‘The Cannibalist Manifesto’ (1928) explaining that the Tupí’s ate other humans as a way to possess their characteristics. This theme speaks to the wider history of Brazil, which has formed as an amalgamation or ‘digestion’ of other cultures. Varejão ’s work has always in some way or another alluded to issues of Brazil’s diverse racial identity. 

Critical View…

Like the works of renowned artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Varejão dares to blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture to the visceral and gruesome forms of the human body. Varejão takes after Bourgeois in that her art becomes anthropomorphic, as if it breathes and seeps blood through its cracked-skinned pulpy surface. The works remain beautiful, yet uncomfortable to look at.