Since she began exhibiting paintings, sculptures and installations in the late 1990s, Tatiana Blass has been questioning the notion of spectacle. Paradigmatic examples are her paintings of nearly empty stages and her recent installations in which sculptures molded in paraffin lose their contours and cohesion under the effect of strong spotlights.
Half of the speech on the floor - deaf piano is part of a series of interventions by the artist on musical instruments. At the Bienal, a grand piano receives, while being played, a spill of liquid wax on its strings. A video records the rapid change in the physical state of that material, from the out-of-tune notes to complete silence. The petrified instrument in the form of sculpture ratifies its own irreversible silence. Like a temporal cycle that announces all its stages, the installation mimics the topplings through which life becomes a monument. Something that, in opposition to life, loses its movement: the echo of sound, the voice, the wanderings and possibilities of those who emit them. The piano is a metaphor for the infinite promise of music. After Blass's appropriation, it is no longer.
