Tornado Subterrâneo: Tatiana Blass

Artist Tatiana Blass is holding a solo exhibition at Albuquerque Contemporânea entitled “Tornado Subterrâneo”. The exhibition occupies the first floor of the gallery and is composed of new works and some that have already been exhibited in other cities.

A prominent name in Brazilian contemporary art, the artist explores different languages ​​to address the lack of communication in interpersonal relationships and the subjectivity of the individual in the face of a world in constant transformation. To do so, she uses various media – painting, sculpture, installation and videos – in which she explores the dimensions of time and space in unique ways.

In the “Meia Luz” series, consisting of eight large-scale paintings, the artist references films and plays, constructing scenes and suggesting narratives in which ambiguity prevails. The poorly defined shapes and colors create environments that question the relationships between the characters and their place in the world.

Two 2x3 meter paintings on glass from the “Teatro de Arena –Tornado Subterrâneo” series will be on display at the entrance and back of the gallery. The artist addresses the theme of mining, with desert landscapes and tiny figures. Craters punctuated by some characters in the vastness of the devastated space return to the theme of the stage, as if searching for a role to play in an arena theater and the tiny possibilities of action in the face of environmental destruction. In these works, light and transparency dialogue with the background landscape, creating a spatial play with the surroundings.

The themes of mining and stage space take on other forms in the bronze sculptures, made with paint and wax, in a long and delicate process that highlights the effects of temporality on matter, resulting from a process of melting wax and paint by heat on the metal piece. The remains of the most ephemeral materials, which refer to temporality and decomposition, remain in the works. The images of the process are shown on video, revealing the disappearance of the wax figures – or actors – in the scene created by the artist, merging past and present.

The installation "Half of speech on the floor – Black drums" is a new version of an important work by the artist that is part of the series with musical instruments. Four drums cut in the shape of a large circle, with bass drums, snare drums, floor toms and cymbals, are filled with wax or spread across the floor, occupying 25 square meters. Once again, the theme of the impossibility of communication is brought to the surface, this time through silence, imposed with a certain violence, a radical cut that mutes and makes incompleteness explicit.

Using various material resources, the works often operate meaning based on synesthesia: the silence imposed by the wax, the tactile dimension of the colors, the narrative time suggested in static images, the scenic element loaded with subjectivity, the impossibility of reaching the other in interpersonal relationships. These are very current themes presented with formal rigor and an artistic sensitivity that intrigue and invite the viewer to immerse themselves in sensations and questions.