Envisioning the body politic through dense layers of paint: the art of Adriana Varejao
2008; CIESPAL; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-4247
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Sexuality, and Education
ResumoThe paintings of contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varej?o train viewers in art of seeing. Her works refuse to be taken at face value; rather, they herd eye beneath two dimensional picture plane, provoking a dialogue between rich surface of her canvases and murky, three-dimensional substrata beneath, probing, as theorist E. H. Gombrich has recommend? ed, the ambiguities of vision. Varej?o's eye-opening compositions demand that viewers penetrate their multiple strata and dive into their conceptual and temporal densities. Aesthetic accessibility is thus deliberately hindered, mirroring socio-ethical complexities in her native Brazil and beyond. These works guide viewers along an elaborate visual path to a collective memory of totemic Brazilian body buried beneath landscape of body politic. The goal of this essay is to illuminate this course. More so than most nations, Brazil actively erodes public and private boundaries, eroticizing national identity and politicizing image of Brazilian female form. The scantily-clad female figure?depicted in public relations campaigns, within country and without?carries a vast amount of m?tonymie weight within constructs of national identity, and to a larger extent, as a worldwide commodity. In other words, body of Brasileira has been subsumed within Brazilian archetypal landscape.
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