Executed in 2001, Brazilian born Adriana Varejão’s commanding Macau Wall (Terracotta), forms part of the artist’s celebrated monolithic installation of the same name. Departing from the central tenets of Brazilian contemporary art, which deal in part with the legacy of Conceptualism and the dematerialisation of the object, Varejão’s unique vernacular draws together past and present by engaging the collective socio-cultural unconscious of the artist’s native Brazil and her personal memories of the quotidian. Part of Varejão’s iconic Seas and Tiles series, other examples of which are held in international collections such as the Tate, London and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília, Macau Wall (Terracotta) directly addresses the anachronic informe of the Brazilian Baroque and the rigidity of the modernist grid by disrupting clean minimalist lines into a series of organic cracks and fissures.

Rendered in a rich monochrome of clay-like plaster, each of the 25 panels that comprise the present work is fractured by deep fissures that disrupt the clean minimalist grid of the greater compositional whole. Having stumbled across a book on architecture in a Portuguese bookshop in 2001, Varejão was struck by a photograph of a plainly-tiled, anonymous interior in Macau in China and the commonalities this shared with the functional architecture of her own Brazilian cultural heritage. It was not just the formal qualities of the tiles that caught Varejão’s attention, but their significance in a global discourse on colonialism that stretches from Brazil to Portugal, and until then unbeknownst to Varejão, Portuguese Macau in China. It was these Macau tiles, in their banality and aesthetic formalism as opposed to the ornate decoration of the azulejos – the glazed terracotta tiles familiar to exterior and interior walls of buildings in Portugal and Portuguese colonies across the globe – that provided a counterpoint to her previous artistic excursions. Fascinated by Chinese philosophy and ceramics, Varejão increasingly incorporated Eastern and Western visual references in her creative output as means of validating the “dialectical processes of power and persuasion” in her effort to “bring back to life processes which created them and use them to construct new versions” (Adriana Varejão quoted in: Rina Carvajal, 'Adriana Varejão: Travel Chronicles' in: Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Virgin Territory: Women, Gender, and History in Contemporary Brazilian Art, 2001, p. 116).

Widely used in Portugal since the Middle Ages, the azulejo became a major cultural export during the Portuguese Empire. Varejão’s fascination with the Baroque stems from her visit to a church in the former colonial mining town of Ouro Preto in Brazil during her early twenties. As the artist recalls, “When I arrived in Ouro Preto I was astounded, in ecstasy … It all seemed so magical. I went to sleep and when I woke up I went out walking alone, climbing the cobbled steps of Ouro Preto. That was the day I entered a baroque church for the first time in my life, Antonio Dias’ Nossa Senhora da Conceição. I ended up missing the opening of the National Salon. I visited all the churches in the City, repeatedly, walking barefoot in the streets… for me, it was all about the material, and the experiences, the romance, the pleasure, the sensuality… it’s squeezed in the cracks, between the stones, in the veins of the wood” (Adriana Varejão, quoted in: Exh. Cat., São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Adriana Varejão: Histórias às margens, 2013, pp. 237-39). For Varejão, the sensual materiality of flesh itself is quintessentially Baroque in nature. “Flesh is first connected with the idea of eroticism, I think, which is found in the Baroque”, she has explained, “It’s the space of abundance and excess based on pleasure and lust. For me, flesh is a metaphor for Baroque wood carving, covered all over in gold. Pure voluptuous extravagance” (Adriana Varejão, quoted in Exh. Cat., Paris, Chambre d’échos Echo Chamber, Adriana Varejão, 2005, p. 85). This observation can be seen to embody the spirit of Macau Wall (Terracotta), in the way that the work deforms and integrates the foreign and the fragmentary to create a visually arresting wall relief that rhythmically pulses as though a living organism.

The present work draws a provocative parallel between the violence of Portugal’s colonial past and the ornamental European aesthetic that accompanied it. Indeed, like a totemic memorial, Macau Wall (Terracotta) is a spiritual riposte to the historical impact of the Portuguese Empire and our current cultural and architectural landscape.