Quadro ferido, which was part of the artist’s solo show Terra incógnita [Unknown Land] (1992), is her most complex work, imagining an encounter between several native and non-white foreign characters (and references): Indigenous, Black, and Chinese. The Chinese references can be seen in the iconography (subjects, objects, architecture, landscapes) and in the language (the very style of the painting, evoking an ink drawing, an ancient Chinese parchment, and the manner of representing the landscape). Varejão starts from a composition found in an 11th-century Chinese landscape, from the Song dynasty, in which hills sprout in the background like petrified waves. The central figure, on his back and on a podium, is the enslaved Black warrior appropriated from the famous painting by Dutch painter Albert Eckhout (circa 1610–1666). Here, he appears behind an Indigenous man appropriated from the Portuguese traveler Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira (1756–1815) and interacts with two Chinese women from the 11th century—while one seems to be fighting a duel of spears with him, the other is grabbing his sex, in a study of struggle and copulation, two outstanding crossovers in the clash of cultures. Sugar cane trees appear in the landscape, in an allusion to the second Brazilian economic cycle of the 16th and 17th centuries, next to a large phallic-shaped palm tree, appropriated from the same painting by Eckhout. The real protagonist of the painting lies in the title: the wound, which relates to what is absent: the white man, European culture, and modernity. Quadro ferido is a true dewesternizing tour-de-force, a fabulous celebration of the encounter between African, Indigenous, and Chinese culture in a Brazil imagined in painting. Finally, the scars of colonization remain.

— Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, MASP, 2023

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