Curatorial notes
Adriana Varejão seems to have made this strange, unsettling piece with oil and plaster on wood, though it’s hard to be certain of the ingredients from just looking at it! The whole thing looks like a tiled wall, the kind you might find in a very old building, maybe in Europe. Look closer, and you’ll see that instead of just tiles, there are all these raw, fleshy figures embedded within it. The plaster around them looks like torn flesh, smeared and visceral. It's so unsettling, right? Yet, there's something incredibly compelling about the textures, the contrast between the cool, smooth tiles and the rough, bloody plaster. It's like Varejão is playing with ideas of beauty and horror, tradition and violence. I can't help but think of Francis Bacon with this sort of imagery of distorted flesh. It feels like she is inviting us to look beyond the surface, to confront the messy, complicated layers of history and the human experience. Ultimately, Varejão is inviting us to consider how the past is not just something behind us, but is alive and embedded in the present.
