Beschreibung:

Adriana Varejão A Grande Curva 2010 oil and plaster on canvas 150 x 150 cm (59 x 59 in.) Signed, titled and dated 'A Grande Curva "A.Varejão" 2010' on the reverse.
Provenance Lehmann Maupin, New York Catalogue Essay Adriana Varejão embodies one of the most original voices in Brazilian contemporary art. Her oeuvre covers diverse practices; including painting, sculpture, photography and installation. The artist is renowned for her work in the mid 1990’s, which explore the two juxtaposing motifs: flesh and tiles (often referred to using the Spanish ‘azulejos’). Her work, Celacanto Provoca Maremoto, carried out between 2004 and 2008, features 48 tile inspired paintings that form a structured chaos in a turmoil of blue-tinted arabesques. The work incorporates the sense of free moving flesh and yet alludes to the regulated, accumulative structure of ‘azulejos’ through its composition. The artist’s large-scale, monochromatic paintings that form the subsequent and ongoing Sauna series continue her use of tiled shapes to portray her idealised visual poetics and conceptual impulses. The artist’s perfect control of light and shade along with her fine colour gradations within an otherwise chromatic uniformity, provide the works with a singularly modern aesthetic. Varejão’s style can be explained by the artist’s subtle amalgamation of Baroque illusion, theatricality and the traditional Portuguese decorative ceramic genre. A Grande Curva, executed in 2010, is an extension of Varejão’s Celacanto Provoca Maremoto and Sauna series. The title can be translated from the Spanish to ‘A big curve’ and thus alludes to scale, curvature and trajectory movement. Coated with a mixture of plaster and glue, then painted over in oils, the cracked surface evokes the texture of Chinese celadon and ceramic. In this work, Varejão transmits her interest in the geometric shape and its power to evoke movement and sensuality. The blue, flowing forms in her work allude to nature and running water. Varejão states: “The water is moving, so you know there is a movement. The pictures imply something like a labyrinth. There is solitude in it. They can be very scary in a way, and I think they also create a certain erotic atmosphere: There is a presence of the body which is not there, but there are places where the body should be. There is a virtual body.” (Sabine Rieck, interview with Adriana Varejão 2006, www.artfacts.net). The design is nuanced by light and shadow to introduce volume and create a convoluted space that is becomes a labyrinth of line. The association with tiles evokes sentiments of water and corporality characteristic of locations such as pools and hammans, classically covered with a “skin of tile”. The play of light in the painting reflects the liquid transparency of water and almost seems to slide of the picture plane in a wave-like movement. Varejão speaks about her paintings as intending to reflect the ‘surge’ of the sea.“In this world of baroque convulsion in which angels’ bodies look like or are sustained only by the convulsive disorder of the waves, swells, billows, tidal waves, tides flowing with the energy converting sea currents into optical currents, with the loss of direction imposed against the mesh, beyond the grid, corroded, imperfect, split, cracked like wounded skin, flesh cooked in fire, blue baroque-rococo sea, coastal territory of scrolls, bends, spirals, body parts, yet all a paradoxical conceptual entirety of fragments in the totalization of the surface, with its folds, beachcombers, white, monochromes, light, the harbour upon arrival after navigating, roaming, sliding on the surface that is simultaneously constructed, a near masonry of tiles and liquidity moving under the mirror-like calmness of the water, which becomes stained, checkered, shattered, corroded, displaced, harmoniously unmatched, with a rocky and aqueous quality akin to parts of the troubled waters of the Negro and Solimões rivers as they meet to form the Amazon River…” (Paulo Herkenhof, Glory! The Great Surge, Adriana Varejão São Paulo, Takano, 2001, p. 119). Varejão’s painting becomes an amalgamation of geometric, decorativ