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I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind. Blind but seeing. Blind people who can see, but do not see (José Saramago, Blindness 292)
These transformations explain the paradox that the world can never quite look like a picture, but a picture can look like the world. It is not the 'innocent eye,' however, that can achieve this match but only the inquiring mind that knows how to probe the ambiguities of vision. (E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion 331)
The paintings of contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejäo train viewers in the art of seeing. Her works refuse to be taken at face value; rather, they herd the eye beneath the twodimensional picture plane, provoking a dialogue between the rich surface of her canvases and the murky, three-dimensional substrata beneath, probing, as theorist E. H. Gombrich has recommended, "the ambiguities of vision." Varejäo'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 the socio-ethical complexities in her native Brazil and beyond. These works guide viewers along an elaborate visual path to a collective memory of the totemic Brazilian body buried beneath the landscape of the 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 the image of the Brazilian female form. The scantily-clad female figure-depicted in public relations campaigns, within the country and without-carries a vast amount of métonymie weight within constructs of national identity, and to a larger extent, as a worldwide commodity. In other words, the body of the Brasileira has been subsumed within the Brazilian archetypal landscape.
Artistic responses to this corporeal paradigm have increasingly informed the iconography of Brazilian artists, as Virgin Territory, in text and exhibition forms, attests.' Adriana Varejäo's art, like the hand-stitched embroidery paintings of her near-contemporary, Leonilson,2 captures a body in rain. It falls to her, then-an artist whose works repeatedly reference the visual lexicon of Brazilian art history, especially of the colonial period-to remind viewers of the private individuals widiin and beneath the sexualized "body politic," and to illustrate to the world where their bodies are buried.
In...