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Carolina Stierli de Abreu

01 → Adriana Varejão’s Brasil: A Home in Ruins

Critical Review

2025

This critical review of Adriana Varejão’s retrospective at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Suturas, fissuras, ruínas, was published as a zine for the graduate communication design department’s annual design writing symposium at the Pratt institute.

*Installation view, Adriana Varejão: Suturas, fissuras, ruínas, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, March 26–August 1, 2022. From Left to right, Ruína Brasilis, Ruína 22, Ruína Talavera II, Moedor and and Ruína Talavera I
Adriana Varejão opens her 2022 retrospective, Suturas, fissuras, ruínas, at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo with an atrium of ruins. Five tiled pillars sit at the center of an octagonal room. They are fissured and broken, showing what lies behind the tile: walls made of flesh. It is a visceral greeting.

She began this series shortly before this exhibition with Ruína Brasilis in 2021, then expanded it with Ruína Talavera I, Ruína Talavera II, Moedor, and Ruína 22, all made especially for this installation. Despite having been made so recently, this installation introduces visitors to an idea that Varejão has been addressing throughout her entire career—the vestiges of colonial violence that are impregnated in the walls of the Brasilian ‘home’.

The use of tiles is a recurring theme in Varejão’s work, a nod to the European aesthetics present in the vernacular of Brasilian culture. Tiles were introduced to Brasil through colonization, as they were a staple material in Portuguese architecture and became a staple in Brasilian architecture since they were well suited to the hot and humid tropical climate. But the tiles in Varejão’s works are not tile at all. While from far away her structures imply a solid materiality, both the tiles and the flesh are painted on a metal structure covered in stretched canvas. As the artist mentions in an interview with the exhibit’s curator, Jochen Volz, ‘The flesh is not flesh, it is simulated. In other words, they are about simulation, artificiality, travesty, and tromp l’oeil.’¹This subterfuge prompts the visitor to move closer, examine more intently to understand what these structures are truly made of. I call them structures, not sculptures, because the artist herself doesn’t consider them sculptures. Although many would consider all three-dimensional artwork sculptural, because they are still made of stretched canvas, she refers to them as paintings. She plays into the act of simulation—here we see both a painting disguised as a sculpture and a surface disguised as another. The tile becomes a different surface, skin, and much like skin, when it breaks, it bleeds.

Hiding amid the ruins are what appears to be ‘an architecture made of flesh’², bright red and swirling with texture described by the artist as ‘highly attractive and repulsive at the same time’³. Hiding behind the fissures and cracks behind the tiles, the presence of the flesh questions the nature of the tiles and vice versa. In the presence of the flesh, the tiles become skin, and in the presence of the tiles, the flesh becomes structure; it is the relationship between these materials that builds the narrative of the work. This push and pull dynamic is also explored within the viewer’s instinct, we are so used to gazing upon ruins with fascination, visiting historical sites, and exploring lost civilizations. The exposition of ruins usually invites people in, asking them to imagine a glorious past on which civilization was built, but the coldness of the material allows us to detach emotion from what we are truly seeing, not the glory of building, but the destruction of what once was built. Architectural remains don’t bleed, and by bringing the warmth of flesh back to architecture Varejão brings to the forefront our visceral instinct to look away from blood and gore, bringing to the surface the violent process in which ruins become ruins ‘...as if the surface could no longer hide the brutality underneath’⁴.

The violence hinted at here is a very specific form of violence, and that link lies in the very specific type of tile Varejão chooses to depict in these works. Although she has a long history of using Portuguese tiles in her work, the more traditional form of tiles Varejão uses in her earlier work are glazed white and blue tiles, with figurative depictions of subjects, landscapes, or patterns. Those tiles are more directly linked to Brasil’s colonial past as they embody the baroque/rococo aesthetics of the European early modern colonial period, and therefore works created using that era’s aesthetic values feel more like a commentary on a colonial past rather than a colonial present. However, in this specific installation, she chooses a more contemporary style of tile, solid shapes in bright colors arranged in geometric patterns that are reminiscent of the materials currently used in many Brasilian homes, particularly in the kitchen, particularly in the past 50 years or so. These works count on the Memória afetiva of the viewer to link these materials not to the distant memory of history but the recent memories of their childhood homes.

While originally a term used in the study of psychology to refer to childhood memories that are tied to specific feelings or emotions⁵, as Brasil finds itself craving for a national identity not defined by foreign powers, the Bobos⁶ (as the french would call it) of Brasil have introduced the term Memória afetiva into the cultural zeitgeist to promote products that take traditional elements of Brasilian home culture and ‘elevate’ them with a more sophisticated execution. This term is often used by Michelin-starred restaurants, emerging brands, and bougie boutiques in affluent metropolitan cities to sell products using nostalgia, making the Brasilian public (especially the ones who frequent art museums like the Pinacoteca) more than familiar with the re-contextualization of the vernacular of the home. But here Varejão subverts this trend of reminiscence by bringing attention to what lies beneath the veil of fond memory, a ‘home’ built on violence: ‘...it is also a wake-up call to look beneath the surfaces, question hegemonic narratives and recognize the violence of history.’⁷

Varejão presents these materials in the form of supporting architectural features like walls and pillars, embodying the violence of coloniality that is still the supporting structure behind the labor dynamics of the ‘home’ in upper-middle-class circles of Brasil. Those dynamics are perpetuated not only by labor practices but also by the architecture of the homes this happens in. Brasil still has a domestic culture that relies heavily on women of color to take on domestic labor, like cleaning, cooking, serving, raising children, and so on. This dynamic often manifests in well-off families, who are more often than not white, employing live-in nannies, cooks, cleaners, and drivers, who are more often than not people of color. While they may all live under the same roof, the architectural divisions could not be any clearer. Most ‘nicer’ Brasilian homes are still built with hierarchy in mind, creating rooms and entrances that are only used by domestic laborers. High-rise buildings have service elevators and back doors that maids, doormen, and delivery drivers are expected to use at all times. It is very common for there to be ‘maids quarters’ in the back of the house with separate bedrooms and bathrooms connected to the laundry room or kitchen, even in newer buildings.

This creates a semi-segregation within the ‘home’ that harbours back to the architectural practices established during colonial slavery with the senzala and the casa grande. In the Luso-Brasilian tradition, the slave quarters and the master’s house have always been connected, creating ‘“zones of fraternization” that enabled miscegenation and created a new social and economic order.’⁸ as Patricio del Real mentions in his analysis of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar, a term he borrows from Gilberto Freyre⁹. While miscegenation is now widely regarded as a positive force on the shaping of Brasilian culture, it is undeniable that it emerged from violent practices, but this violent root within the home is often masked by the veil of familiarity. Despite most participants in these dynamics adhering to a belief system that acknowledges colonization as a harmful and violent structure of the past, they fail to see the presence of its remnants in their own homes. Varejão seeks to lift this veil by bringing this violent supporting structure of the ‘home’ to the material realm, because, as she states in her interview with the curator, ‘It is by experiencing the tactile dimension that one can truly believe’¹⁰.

With this installation placed at the entrance of her retrospective, Adriana Varejão establishes from the outset that, although the subject matter of most of her work up to this point has been historical in nature, it is far from an examination of the past but a decortication of Brasil’s colonial present. Throughout her career, she has taken the aura of violence left behind by colonialism and given it solid form, made it impossible to ignore, trained her public to see what was hidden in plain sight, but too often has their gaze been focused outward. So Varejão invites us to take a closer look inward at the Brasilian home, a home built on the ruins of violence and the vestiges of colonialism. Now, she turns her viewers’ attention to the ghosts within their own walls, pointing the discernment for violence she has been building within them right back at themselves as if to say, this story is not about them, it is about you, and it has always been about you.

¹Jochen Volz, Interview with Adriana Varejão, October 2021.
²Jochen Volz, “Forward,” in Adriana Varejão: Suturas, Fissuras, Ruínas, n.d.
³Volz.
⁴Volz.
⁵Kerryane Lima, “O que é: Memória afetiva,” personal blog, kerryanelima (blog), accessed April 10, 2025, https://kerryanelima.com.br/home/glossario/o-que-e-memoria-afetiva-e-sua-importancia-na-psicologia/.
⁶“Bobo (Socio-Economic Group),” in Wikipedia, December 23, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bobo_(socio-economic_group)&oldid=1264812199.
⁷Jochen Volz, Interview with Adriana Varejão, October 2021.
⁸Patricio del Real, “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar,” n.d.
⁹Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves = Casa-Grande & Senzala : A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, 2nd English-language ed., rev. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986).
¹⁰Volz, Interview with Adriana Varejão.

Bibliography

“Bobo (Socio-Economic Group).” In Wikipedia, December 23, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bobo_(socio-economic_group)&oldid=1264812199.

Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves = Casa-Grande & Senzala : A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. 2nd English-Language ed., rev. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986.

Lima, Kerryane. “O que é: Memória afetiva.” Personal blog. kerryanelima (blog). Accessed April 10, 2025. https://kerryanelima.com.br/home/glossario/o-que-e-memoria-afetiva-e-sua-importancia-na-psicologia/.

Real, Patricio del. “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar,” n.d.

Volz, Jochen. “Forward.” In Adriana Varejão: Suturas, Fissuras, Ruínas, n.d.

Interview with Adriana Varejão, October 2021.