BETWEEN YOUR TEETH
By Mariana Varela
Mariana Varela writes about the exhibition “Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão: Between Your Teeth”, on show until 22 September 2025 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Centre in Lisbon.
Beloved life, my death takes time / To say what to men / To propose what journey? / Kings, ministers / And all you politicians / What word besides gold and darkness / Remains in your ears? / Besides your RAPACITY / What do you know / Of the souls of men? / Gold, conquest, profit, deceit / And our bones / And the blood of the people / And the lives of men / Between your teeth
(Hilda Hilst — Poem to the men of our times — II).
Sitting in front of a Paula Rego painting is no ordinary experience. But there are those who pass through a forest and see nothing but wood for the fire, as Tolstoy used to say. We’ve become accustomed to looking at things through eyes filled with everyday life and, so often, a painting is just a painting. Always framed in a similar way, its size and colours possibly changed, an inattentive person might not pay attention to what it says. But just as listening is not hearing, looking is not seeing. From the poem that begins this text, a short verse, ‘Between Your Teeth’, was taken to name the most recent Gulbenkian exhibition, which brings together two major names in modern and contemporary art.
At the corner of the 20th and 21st centuries, Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão, now in dialogue, converge in a common space through a curatorship that proposes communication between them. Due to the size of the works, the themes dealt with and the Atlantic confluence, the exhibition suggests not only the meeting of two sensibilities, but perhaps, eventually, the meeting of two historical-aesthetic experiences about the crossed destiny of these two countries. In this sense, the exhibition brings us face to face with two artists who express not only a particular sensibility, but a broad theme that reaches the dimension of a culture and a time. In this sense, it is a question of capturing both history and aesthetics through the hands of the artists.
Paula Rego needs no introduction. A key Portuguese painter, she painted from the second half of the 20th century until the beginning of the 20th century, forging a vast body of realist, figurative and abstract paintings. Paula Rego focussed above all on the figures, symbols and everyday portraits of the Portuguese family and culture. She paid special attention to the female universe, which she portrayed in a raw and realistic way in everyday portraits, but also in an intrepid and merciless way, shedding light on violence, the grotesque, the shapeless, non-standard bodies, the viscera of humours — leaving no stone unturned on fundamental issues such as the question of abortion. Blood is almost always present in her paintings. And even in the most apparently banal family portrait, you can sense the presence of fear and cruelty. Rego used a certain grotesque cut to emphasise the forms of reality, presenting women, the family, the symbolic, the religious and the sexual from a perspective that was both realistic and shapeless, raw and diabolical, real and cutting. She dug with her fingernail into the wounds and wings that shaped the imagination of a country, paying special attention to the female universe and the violence that surrounds these bodies.
Saatchi Collection, London.
Rego’s paintings in the exhibition exemplify the vastness of her oeuvre, ranging from more realistic and figurative to more abstract. Regardless of form, the painter leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the issue of violence. If paintings such as ‘Snow White and the Stepmother (1995)’ or ‘The Mother (1997)’ are examples of a more figurative phase, others, more abstract, call on the clairvoyant to find the clarity of the subject in the confusion of colours: ‘When we had a Country House we threw parties and then killed the blacks’ (1961) or ‘Salazar vomiting the Homeland’ (1960). In these paintings, which are almost childlike in their abstraction and verge on the nightmarish, the painter reveals the most brutal violence, perhaps through the disconfiguration of the forms.
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Because it is in the nature of violence to tear apart forms, perhaps it is precisely beyond language and figuration — in the inability to figure — that the most absurd violence is expressed. The limits of my language are the limits of my world, said Wittgenstein. And there really is something out-of-human about these works, something that escapes language because it exceeds reality in violence and brutality, it exceeds reality as fiction. It is precisely this excess and violence that the exhibition focuses on. Of course, the unavoidable point, the main wound of this encounter is colonialism. But when we delve into colonialism, we find a lot more. Salazarism, raw violence, the homeland-family conjunction, animality and the construction of the feminine are some of them. Perhaps we could say that these are the themes responsible for bringing these two artists together at the Gulbenkian Foundation.
Using more than a paintbrush, Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão gives shape, form and contour to other wounds, telling other stories. Varejão produces medium and large-scale works, with the exception of some smaller-scale works at the beginning of the exhibition, such as eyewitnesses. The artist herself is represented in these works, sometimes as an Indian, sometimes as Moura. And without one eye — possibly precisely because of this — she appears as the one who sees and witnesses history. The appearance of these historically marginalised figures is not banal — nor could it be. It’s not just because of the image of the artist herself, who appears sometimes as an Indian, sometimes as a Moor, and because of her gaze — but because of what is prophetic or threatening about these figures. Indians or Moors, cut down and wounded — it is through her gaze that we can reach another version of the facts, tell another story.
Much of Varejão’s plastic work and the choice of what it depicts, however, means that the artist applies another way of expressing violence and injury, one that is not figurative or human. Most of Varejão’s works explore the tension between the organic and the inorganic through the slow appearance of blood and viscera behind the tiles and walls. Although it is the Portuguese tiles and the sacro-colonial figures that are exposed in much of this inorganic life of the objects, leaving no doubt as to the location of the traces of blood, her work has a character of openness or potential abstraction when it acts in the continuous revealing of the blood and organs hidden behind the walls. This tension between objects and organic life, which is the same tension between concealment and exposure, suggests something about the very making of material things. Like a kind of revolt of the objects, the artist gives form to the intimate life inscribed in their making, suggesting either the necessary link between humanity and its objects, its projects, its buildings, or the suspicion of a vibrant life in inorganic matter, which little by little assaults us with its viscera and its history.
It is precisely this breaking down of the distinction between material-organic, between hidden-exposed, or even precisely this well-crafted confluent tension that makes Varejão one of the most important contemporary visual artists. Whether it’s the technical mastery or the very choice of figures, at a certain point when you encounter her works you don’t know whether you’re in front of a work of art or violence itself. The aesthetic impact is so strong that, as with love, our notions of time, space and category — our thinking, in short — go to the depths of ourselves and we are faced with violence itself.
In this forest there are no firewood: only real trees and real roots that communicate with us in our wild humanism, in our inner experience. And I say that because the colonial relationship, here, more than placed, acquires a certain universality through the figuration of violence. The first painting in the exhibition, the one that awaits us on arrival, is Paula Rego’s ‘A primeira missa no Brasil’ (The first mass in Brazil) (1993), which features a pregnant girl, a mass being said in the background and the daily and symbolic panacea of milk cups, turkeys and a miniature bloody woman.
But brushing against history suddenly becomes a physical experience. From the one who has had her eye gouged out comes not only a counter-narrative — always hidden by the world’s leaders. It is an opening, a luminescence and a breath. The work of Varejão and Rego achieves, in this link that is both historical and aesthetic, precisely what we expect from the work of an artist: mediation, like that of an angel, between human beings and time, between ideas and forms. The living flesh of which the substance of this encounter is made is the obscene violence that runs through a culture and a history. These artists who have dedicated themselves to painting and producing about what is present in the substrate of our culture have not shied away from immersing themselves in horror and trauma.
Thus, in the hands of these artists, there is, on the one hand, the figurative display of a distorted and therefore excessively real reality. Varejão operates, with exceptional technical and symbolic mastery, the reconciliation necessary to remove us from everyday experience and place us in the flow of history and, therefore, in a kind of eternity. Rego, for her part, summons us to look at the real flesh of everyday life, with its deformity and dark side. So, with this dialogue, rather than telling us something that we may or may not know, due to the particularity of a certain gaze, the exhibition manages, through the perfect confluence of original tensions, to tell us everything, without having to say anything.
“Clean bombs, they say? And you smile / And so do I. / And we see each other already dead / A varnish over the body, clean, static, / More dead than clean, exactly / Our glass body, rigid / At the mercy of your actions, political man. / Clean bombs over the old flesh / Splendid, sharp stained glass over the afternoon / And we, in the afternoon, mutely rethink / The fatal cleanliness over our heads / And your wise eloquence, men-hyenas / Leaders of the world.”
(Hilda Hilst — Poems to the men of our time — XIV)
Mariana Varela
She has a degree in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo and is a Philosopher-in-Course at the FCSH, NOVA University of Lisbon. She did a Master’s thesis on Flexible Capitalism and the New Social Movements and is currently working on a thesis on Materialism and Temporalities of Nature in Philosophy. She has collaborated with study groups on the Situationists and has been a member of Experimental Poetry groups, taking part in a series of literary events in São Paulo. In Lisbon she published the poetry books Enigmas de Jaguar e Jasmim e Rotativa, both by Urutau. She has been published in literary magazines and anthologies.
Published in Artecapital, 30 May 2025
