Art is the intersection of people, images and objects in the world. At this intersection, by activating time and space, art enables the viewer to encounter personal and collective history, activating a series of sensitive mechanisms. And it is at this very moment that art becomes more revolutionary, when it touches affections, memories and sensations. The subject who sees is the subject who feels and who risks losing his certainties, knowing that something is missing. “When seeing is feeling that something ineluctably escapes us, that is: when seeing is losing. Everything is there. [...] Things to see from afar and touch up close, things that you want or cannot caress. Obstacles, but also things to get out of and re-enter. In other words, volumes with voids.”1
Tatiana Blass's production is marked by the constant practice of painting and an experimentalism around the subject: from the use of different paints (gouache, acrylic, oil, synthetic enamel) – on varied supports, such as canvas, paper and glass – to the dilation of the painting in three-dimensional space using different types of materials, such as paraffin, brass, ceramics, found objects, among others. Therefore, it is a broad material universe. Whether the work is a sculpture, an object, an installation or a video, it is always crossed by pictorial problematization – which highlights issues of volume, framing and fitting – and by the presence of line in the composition.
The paintings in the series Os Stentados (The Seated Ones), started in 2019, and Os de pé (The Standing Ones), started in 2022, seem to draw the eye into a constructed space that resembles a stage opening or a circus ring, in which human figures appear arranged in relation to other elements, such as chairs and tables. The works are based on images collected from photographs and records of theater plays, which serve as a first reference for the composition. These paintings are constructed by superimposing layers of impure colors, with tones ranging mainly from gray-green to blue and from red-brown to yellow. In the same way as in previous paintings, such as in the series entitled Entrevista (Interview) (2013) and De Costas / Teatro (From behind/Theatre) (2014), the work uses thin and very diluted paint, which leaves traces and gives the painting an enigmatic air.
In these paintings, the point of view is unique, as the event is portrayed at a specific moment, which gives them a temporal unity, as in photography. Time is the present, but these images keep a kind of memory due to the presence of color fields that overlap the figures. These fields guide the material construction of the work towards intuitively finding a certain chromatic agreement for the composition. They are not mere spaces or gaps, but attempts to fill a hole that suggests some emotion in the painting. Sometimes heads and torsos become nothing more than circular and oval shapes, while a chair can be seen from a single vertical line representing a foot. These oval shapes appear in other older works by the artist, notably in her collages. Another characteristic of these images is that they see horizontal and vertical lines – gaps, cracks and fissures – “organic lines”, like openings of light that reveal continuities and discontinuities between color fields. In this sense, the organic line is characterized, as in Lygia Clark, “by being the prepositional space between; it is the void that articulates the planar discourse of color; it is the place in the air we breathe that integrates and articulates the concrete areas of the painting”. 2
The first time the artist tried taking painting into three-dimensional space was with Atavio, from 2004, an installation held at Espaço 397, in São Paulo. On the occasion, Tatiana Blass covered part of the space's grayish cement floor with pink and blue Paviflex, forming fields of color with rounded edges, with a soft appearance, giving the impression that a large volume of paint had been spilled there. . An illusion. In some parts of the colored floor there were hollow semicircles, holes, as if the paint had been contained by something rigid. As in Os Sentados (The Seated Ones), rounded geometric shapes alternated with the figurative elements of the work – plant pots, doors, steps, elements of the environment itself –, creating estrangement. In other collages and paintings from the same period, blocks of color are organized in a more or less overlapping manner, but always leaving some gap in the plane of the painting. These empty spaces are, occasionally, the very background of the work, or they are distances between geometric shapes, suggesting mountainous landscapes or moving clouds in the sky. In the set of sculptures in the work Cauda (Tail), from 2005, masses of color cover objects on the floor of the exhibition space. Solid, bright colors cover part of the sculptural object, giving the impression of a viscous liquid flowing through a spherical volume. The masses of color appear soft, but upon closer inspection we notice that they are rigid and solid. Another humorous illusion created by the artist.
The idea of something that floods, flows or overflows is repeated in many other works. In Pintura que derrete (Melting Painting), from 2022, the image painted with paint and wax on metal slowly crumbles through a simple heat conduction mechanism. When connected to the gallery's electrical circuit, the plate, which is the base on which the paints were applied, heats up and gradually undoes the paint. The colors flow creating a shapeless image that is new not only to the audience but also to the artist.
In the sculpture Os Sentados (The Seated Ones), from 2022, created for the Millan gallery space, there is a human figure, in wax, seated and, inside, there is a wooden chair. Above her hangs a pendant with a heat source that gradually melts the wax, dismantling part of the figure and revealing the chair. In the same way as in previous works, such as Vitrine_Boneco sem rest, from 2018, and Coluna (Agachado) (Column (Crouched)), from 2013, the piece deforms and remains of material remain on the floor. Still in this procedural key is Cera-ceramica (Wax-ceramic), from 2020, an action recorded on video in which a wax head and a ceramic head move due to the heat that the flame of a switched on stove focuses on them. Here it is necessary to distinguish the violence of what is represented (the sensational, the spectacular) from the violence of sensation, as Tatiana Blass's art is far from being a tragic or cruel staging. It is necessary, then, to think more about the violence of the variability of the intensive and differential states of matter than about a supposed cruelty inflicted on an object. By causing the undoing of the form, be it the human figure or the space of the painting canvas, Blass circulates the intensities of living matter, that is, flows, forces, affects and sensations, in a double movement of containment and extravasation. “Tatiana Blass penetrates the emptiness of things, the poetry of everything that exceeds, that overflows.” 3
There are two movements underway: liquefaction and extravasation. What remains, at the end of these works that deal with matter that cannot be contained, is a scene of fragmentation and a certain disorder, a kind of physicality of painting. In a 2011 text about the Fim de Partida exhibition, critic Paulo Venancio Filho says the following: “Tatiana provokes a kind of sculptural inversion: the regression of sculpture to matter, the remission to the formless state. The sculptures, which are the actors and characters, dissolve under the heat of the lights and the beginning becomes the end. From wax to wax, from dust to dust.” Matter, be it paint, wax, clay or water, is in transformation, in movement, as it is not contained.
In two previous works – Penélope, from 2011, and Mais dia, menos noite (More day, less night), from 2019 –, the overflow machine is set in motion on an architectural scale, through a kind of invasion of space through color. In these works, two historic buildings, the Capela do Morumbi, in São Paulo, and the Pampulha Museum, in Belo Horizonte, are taken over by a large red stain made of wool threads, immersing the viewer in the soft material and causing a space reversal. In the center of the installation there is a loom from which, on one side, an unfinished carpet emerges. On the other side, the threads, which enter the loom to be woven, hang out and spread across the floor, walls and facades and take over the landscape outside the building, where red threads mix with the vegetation, altering the scene and creating a continuity between inside and outside.
The set of recent works that the artist called O fim continua (The End Continues) (2022) also deals with the ideas of containment and overflow, in addition to those of continuity and discontinuity. Garden hoses – normally flexible, made of rubber – are recreated in metal and have the two ends joined together, causing strangeness, as if they were enclosed in themselves. It is no coincidence that the sculptures are made of iron, a very common element around Belo Horizonte, where the artist has lived for some years. Due to the presence of the metal, the earth in that region has a reddish color and, as a result of the intense mining activity, the dry dust spreads and leaves the entire landscape reddish-brown – a truly striking fact for those who live there.
Iron hoses, when closed on themselves, form long Möbius strips, with many turns, eliminating the separation between inside and outside. As often happens in Tatiana Blass's work, common objects are separated from their primary function, causing shifts in meaning, as in the series Metade da fala no chão (Half of the speach on the floor) (2008-18). In this work, musical instruments go through a process of muting, either by having the sound amplification pathways obstructed (by the spill of wax that clogs the air outlet and stops the production of sounds) or thanks to the subversion of their original configuration by the lengthening their shapes.
The interruption of something that should happen or the annulment of an item in the landscape, this kind of “presence through lack”, is an element common to all the works mentioned here and which already marked other older works, such as Páreo. This 2006 work is a sculpture made up of four life-size horse legs descending a staircase. The rest of the horse in movement is only suggested, recreated mentally by the viewer. In place of the body, there is the surrounding landscape, as if it had been erased or interrupted by the landscape. The animal becomes present through its own absence, as it is up to the viewer to imagine it in space and construct the entire image. This type of operation can also be seen in later works, such as Zona Morta (Dead Zone), from 2007, and Calçado, from 2018.
In Reviravolta (Turnaround) (2022) there is also an iron hose, but it is located inside the house (Milan gallery), pouring water, which then runs down the floor, to the lower floor of the building, crossing the architecture and marking the space with a trail of rust. Downstairs, the drops fall on a sculpture whose raw clay head is gradually disfigured and deformed by the action of the water. In an autophagic circuit, water consumes clay. Here, the work changes throughout the exhibition and, as almost always happens in Tatiana Blass' work, the visitor-spectator can witness only part of the transformation process, without ever having access to the entire image.
In this sense, the artist manages time itself to say something about that which escapes us; it subverts the architectural space as a common place for self and other, a shared place, in search of other logics that alter the relationship between the senses based on dynamic and singular events. In “Sede” (Thirst), a short poem written by her, the artist writes:
the difference
between the lake
and the hole that the rain fills with water is how much the soil
gives in to water
The word “thirst” refers to discomfort, dissatisfaction, need, but also desire and will. The lake and the hole end up being the same thing, even though they are close, in the poem, due to their difference. It's an intelligent way of approaching the nature of things – the lake was once a hole and could be so again. The poem is also an admirable way of talking about the infinite void that inhabits the subject and which is the engine of desire. Because all art “is characterized by a certain way of organizing around this void”.5 It is a way of making oneself present through absence.
__
1 Didi-Huberman, Georges. What we see, what sees us. Trans. Paulo Neves. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1998, p. 10; 34.
2 Bois, Yves-Alain; Herkenhoff, Paulo. Lygia Clark (1920-1988): 100 years. Translation by Kika Serra. (Exhibition catalogue.) Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 2021, p. 85.
3 De Freitas, Douglas. “Penelope’s labor.” (Exhibition pamphlet.) São Paulo: Capela do Morumbi, Sept. 2011.
4 Venancio Filho, Paulo. “End of game”. (Exhibition pamphlet.) Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Jan. 2011.
5 Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, livre VII: L’Éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1986, p. 155.
__
Camila Bechelany (1979, Belo Horizonte, MG) lives and works in São Paulo. She works as a researcher, critic and curator. She has a master's degree in art and public policy from New York University and Social Anthropology from EHESS, Paris and a PhD candidate in art history from the same institution. Her academic research is interested in the presence of Latin American art in France from the perspective of the history of exhibitions. She has curated several roles in institutions and galleries in Brazil and France and publishes critical texts regularly.
