ADRIANA VAREJÃO

This body of work is conceived in direct dialogue with the artist’s participation in the Brazilian Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (until 22 November 2026).

While the tile paintings presented in the pavilion draw inspiration from Baroque and religious tilework of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the paintings in Modernisms shift the investigation towards Brazil’s modern period. They represent a temporal leap: from colonial tilework to modernist tiles, and from a tradition inherited from Portugal to a visual language that Brazil reinvented and made its own.

For more than three decades, Varejão has researched Portuguese tiles introduced to Brazil during the colonial era, which have shaped her artistic production. Recently, her attention has been drawn to tilework in modern Brazilian architecture, which began to play a central role in the urban landscape from the 1940s onwards, appearing on façades, public buildings and housing developments.

The revival of tilework represented not nostalgia, but a cultural operation that allowed Brazilian modernism to reconcile tradition with the avant-garde, transforming inherited materials into instruments of modernity. As Varejão states, ‘Rather than breaking with history, Brazilian modernism absorbed and transformed it, creating a bridge between the colonial legacy and projects for the future.’

The artist’s extensive research across cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador and Belo Horizonte has resulted in an archive dedicated to a largely undocumented visual heritage of industrially produced patterns that became prevalent from the 1970s onwards. This exhibition proposes an act of recovery, bringing to light a body of work that shaped the Brazilian urban imagination, and acknowledges tilework as a vital element of Brazil’s visual culture, connecting the past and present.

Image: Photo © Jaime Acioli