Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Under the Influence: Adriana Varejão & Valeska Soares, in parallel with the Tucci Russo, Torino, 1983 exhibition. If the show in Carpintaria’s main space aims at presenting sculptures first shown in Italy in the 1980s, the works from Adriana Varejão and Valeska Soares shown here highlight the formal and thematic relations between theirs and Machado’s (1942-2015) work.

On the second floor of Galleria Tucci Russo, in 1983, Machado produced an installation in which he covered two columns in the exhibition space with black mortar. On one of them, he built a pyramid-shaped base; on the other, he built the same form, in pink, adjacent to the ceiling. Both were covered in tiles. Choosing this installation as a starting point, Adriana Varejão produced Ruina Talavera II (2021), shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York, and in São Paulo during the artist’s retrospective at Pinacoteca do Estado. This is the first time this monumental work can be seen by audiences in Rio de Janeiro. Tiles, in Machado, are a material charged with the rawness of construction work, while its historical-critical function is at stake in Varejão. Alluding to Portuguese tilemaking as much as Talavera poblana crockery. For her, tiles are an emblem of visual culture, while for Ivens they are a readily available, mass-produced construction typology. Both works meet, however, in their sheer physicality and in the architectural distortion they provoke: Machado’s black mortar becomes Varejão’s marbled flesh.

In the 1970s, Ivens Machado presented Sem título (performance com bandagem cirúrgica), in which he appeared mummified in surgical bandages. In the middle of a military dictatorship, connotations of tension, paralysis and concealment were clearly felt. In Untitled (from Bondage) (2019), Valeska Soares approaches the work like a hurt body, remitting to Ivens’ performance. In the first of the diptych’s canvasses, the artist wraps the lower part of the frame in bandages, in a procedure that might stanch or hide a wound. The second canvas is studded with pieces of twisted, burnt paper, in a composition whose formal simplicity highlights the brutality of the surface’s incisions.

In lending the field of sculpture political and erotic allusions, we establish crossing points between Ivens Machado, Adriana Varejão and Valeska Soares, while a circuit is formed between the human body in its constitutive vulnerability and the body of the support, in its inherent instability. After Ivens’ death in 2015, there has been a shared movement for resuming his oeuvre and seeing it anew, rescuing a restless, endlessly challenging presence, of which Varejão and Soares, in the works shown here, are heiresses and interpreters.