Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present new works by the artist Adriana Varejão. The exhibition includes paintings, in large and small formats, and drawings, where Varejão deepens her investigation of virtual environments. Both the paintings and the drawings depict swimming pools, saunas, bathrooms, halls, and corridors completely covered with tiles.

In this series, Varejão's painting leaves the conceptual field of historical references and enters the field of the sensitive. These works ally figuration to abstract geometry and tackle questions inherent to the tradition of painting such as color, texture, composition, and perspective. The paintings dialogue with architecture and space in a virtual manner. They are secret chambers without doors or windows that create an illusion of space. They are imaginary, atemporal environments.

The artist herself described this body of work in an interview with the curator of the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Helene Kelmachter: "In these paintings I begin by working a monochromatic surface: white, pink, green, blue… Next I project the geometric mesh that determines the composition and the perspective. I then paint the shadows, the light, the half tones, in a very complex palette. I also look for a dynamic in color, giving it a temperature. Cooling it down with violet, or heating it up with yellow, for example."

The Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon is hosting a major individual show of Adriana Varejão's work until January 2006. The Lisbon the last step of an itinerary which began in the Fondation Cartier in Paris in March 2005, and continued to the Domus Artium 2002 (Salamanca Art Center) in Spain.