The darkest night and I
This Pedro Varela exhibition begins at night. High night, closed night. It’s at this darkest hour that we are invited to enter his latest work. With this set of works, seen as soon as one steps into the Zipper gallery, the artist takes a definitive stride towards painting. Which he does fearlessly. Or, perhaps even better, shaping this and other fears of the unknown in the process of creating each piece. It contrasts starkly with the extremely colourful atmosphere of some of his previous works, both the water colours and the collages made with adhesive, which carried a clear, intense and sunny tropical influence. Here, we are still in the tropics, but under the feminine, fleeting and indirect light of the moon.
The first paintings of this show, immersed in indigo, form nocturnal masses of great impact from afar. And they are gradually revealed in various tones of blue as we approach. The painting chosen to open the ensemble highlights this vision in the dark, in which beings and objects are revealed as the eye becomes accustomed to the weak light. We enter the forest, towards the unknown. It’s interesting that Varela has chosen precisely the closed woods to open this nocturnal exhibition. In classic children’s tales there is always a forest, synonymous with danger, mystery and the maturing of the characters. Little Red Riding Hood, Tom Thumb, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel all passed through the forest's acid test. Pedro also passes through it, makes us do likewise, and right at the start of the path we realise that we have gone past the clearing hand in hand with Goya and Bosch. We find somewhat fantastical alligators, snakes and animals lurking, being drawn in the foreground and lost in the background of blues.
The journey to children’s stories is not made by chance: the idea of narrative, of a flow of images that comes about almost like the turning of a book's pages, has always been present in the artist's works. The use of this verb, "to draw", is also not random. It is interesting to see how Varela tackles the challenge of upping the voltage of the pictorial charge of his works without, however, abandoning his perspective of drawing. It is as if he were venturing into the forest and facing the night of a new stage, flanked by his history and stock he has accumulated over years of artistic activity. The choice of blue is also a wholesome one. It is the blue of the ballpoint pen, so often used by Varela to draw, and also the blue with which he transforms the glass door leading to the outbuilding of the Zipper into a garden of transparencies. In these pieces, drawing features in figures that resemble apparitions or fantasies, dreams or nightmares of this midsummer night. They are sketches that leap from the pictorial background, amid mountains that we only glimpse, glints of light amid this vegetation in the darkness.
We follow the indigo paintings and arrive at a transient phase of the assembly, where the dark night becomes early morning. White begins to appear in a painting in the corridor between the two spaces of the gallery's main room. In this mixture of Vanitas with Carmen Miranda, Varela reaffirms his Latin American veins, always worked in an unashamed and profound manner. The pineapples, flowers and avocado pears that were seen in the dark night are now more sinuous, highlighted in their curves, which give new life to the tchicatchicabum skull, highlighting, as in a fiesta, the transitory aspect of death and of painting itself.
The arrival of the white and the first rays of light allow us to see the darkest tones of the bluish night from other perspectives. We can see it is a Klein blue; a plunge into the body of the colour. And a Matisse blue; tactile colour, colour to touch. An India ink blue, a stamp, writing. A Moorish blue, a blue from North Africa – turquoise to scare off the bad spirits. The water colours of the second room show us this blue more and more drawn into the white background and take us back to the cities – now floating, now submersed - that always mark Varela’s work.
It is easy, in this exhibition, to draw a parallel with the work of two very important painters for the recent history of Brazilian art: Luiz Zerbini and Adriana Varejão. Varela speaks to the former through this tropical unashamedness, this unabashed treatment of exuberance and a fusion between two significant statutes of painting: still life and landscape. For both Zerbini and Varela, it is hard to say which is one and which is the other. The relation with Varejão arises through zigzagging, yet for that very reason, perhaps even more powerful paths. Varela’s blue on white also flows out, as does Varejão’s, in the Companhia das Índias chinaware, an element that unites Brazil - the baroque cradle of art made in our land – to Portugal and the East. Aleijadinho developed his eye through studying Chinese porcelain which arrives in Minas Gerais from the Portuguese colonial outposts in the Far East. Not by chance, his saints have slanted eyes and samurai beards. Varejão highlights this crossover in Passagem de Macau a Vila Rica [Passage from Macau to Vila Rica], in which exhibition two landscapes – of China, and of Brazil - are lost in the same mist. In another work, Naufrágio da Companhia das Índias [Shipwreck of the Companhia das Índias], the artist presents the seabed with a mosaic made of shards of broken chinaware, fragmented into various possible blues. Varela offers us his own vision, full of life, of this heritage of any Brazilian. His blue is navy, it is submerged in these waters of many years and geographies. His blue is also sky, as demonstrated by the castles, towers and belvederes that float in the watery brush strokes.
I spoke of a Matisse blue and this is a fundamental artist for understanding the final third of Varela’s exhibition, in which the gallery reaches the white clouds. A self-professed Orientalist, Matisse is a latent influence on the works made with a utility knife on white sheet, in which cities emerge amid a white fog through the small windows of void cut out from the paper by Varela. The cut-out work, which gives a three-dimensional body to the idea of a drawing, is also present in a new experiment, a series of sculptures which are mounted on scrunched up paper. Supported by this somewhat formless, chaotic mass, that brings to mind a hand as the mould, still-lives/landscapes are born, establishing a very strong dialogue with the already cited tchicatchicabum Vanitas. And they make a clear reference to Mira Schendel’s Droguinhas.
Curiously, in another cut and paste work with white paper, Varela has contacted an artist who is strongly related to Eastern philosophy. In her work with typefaces and words, Mira deals with the Zen notion that empty areas can be a space full of meanings. In her case specifically, the idea that silence – a blank space which involves words – can also speak. It is equally intriguing that these “d’après Droguinhas” are, at once, the close and the possible restart of the course of the exhibition. With the white cut and paste works, Varela brings his exhibition to dawn. But the blue from the other side of the room is still there to remind us: while we experience an aurora, another night is drawn somewhere in our world.
A necessary P.S.: One might resort to the maxim of a “thief who steals from a thief” to talk about the title of this text, taken from a book of short stories by Lygia Fagundes Telles. Its melancholic and at times sombre atmosphere is very much in tune with this exhibition. Varela and Lygia have in common the fact that, like me, they are "good thieves": the author also “stole” her title, which came from the Cecília Meireles’ poem Assovio. And it’s with the start of that poem that I end. Or awaken, perhaps: “Nobody opens the door/ to see what has happened:/ we leave arm in arm/ the dark night and I”.
Daniela Name, 2013