A fold summarizes the subtlety of the name of this exhibition, which condenses a period of more than 15 years of production by Tatiana Blass. Composed of around 40 works, the exhibition covers different moments of a multiple trajectory that moves through different media – painting, video, sculpture and installation – and that has never stopped harboring ambiguity and beauty.
"Balanço alicerce" (Foundation Balance) is a title that, in an exercise of poetic reduction, reveals the special ethics of the broad journey of an artist who, mixing and juxtaposing different references – theater, cinema, literature and music – moves brilliantly, through vibration and contagion , border regions and languages. The exhibition reveals the instability typical of a work that displays a map of traces of intimate spaces and thoughts, of relationships with things in a state of latency. Instability, here, refers to the deepest rigor that can be given to the line, to the erasure, to the brushstroke, to each gesture that is found in the oscillation between the firm and the bendable, between heteroclite materials and languages.
This acute point of invention can be glimpsed in the "Bagunça" (Mess) series, works produced from games in which her children started painting and, afterwards, Tatiana continued, bypassing the scene. Thus, bringing artistic work closer to children's games, something was revealed, as enigmatic as it was mobilizing, of a relationship with knowledge that was still in an undomesticated state.
In a series of works whose main reference is the playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose plays – with a strong psychological content and with characters that harbor many doubts and ambiguities – caught her attention in an artistic residency held in the fjords of Norway, Tatiana builds environments, the from theater scenes. Somehow, the magnetic landscape of the deep, narrow valley, as well as the dwellings and architecture of the place, became imbued in her paintings. The planes are diluted into a single pictorial body, making the background, human figures, chairs, tables and other objects that make up the scenes indistinct, without an exact distinction between shape and color. Tatiana dilutes and reconfigures experiences of temporality and contemplation, revealing the world through fragments of reality.
In another series of paintings, these made on glass, there is an inversion of the traditional oil painting technique. Performed on the obverse of the surface, the first layer of enamel applied is always immediately visible, resisting the superimposition of new layers. The artist creates cuts and intervals between the color fields on the glass surface, making the world appear through traces, in a rigorous and, at the same time, sublime construction of color and shape.
Her artworks on paper or cotton canvas – in which the gouache is embedded in the weave of the fabric – have a very unique chromatic theme. Tatiana uses gouache which, characteristically, has an opaque and intense color, and faces the chromatic exercise in a unique way, with a predilection for colors that are difficult to coexist with, such as orange with pink, lemon yellow with brown, and other combinations that intersect in an absolutely unique way.
In "O resto que fica" (The Rest That Stays), a series created on the occasion of an artistic residency in London, Tatiana makes interventions in photographs of abandoned bicycles in London's subways, using white oil paint. Like Alberto Giacometti – who was amazed and marveled at the minimal, radical and singular difference of each scene, and said "everything surpasses me" – the artist also does not close her eyes to everyday revelations and lets us see that what we call reality is a construction that is never completely finished, and it is up to the artistic gesture to provide some contour and possibility of enjoyment.
In the selection of videos, four pairs of characters develop some type of dialogue or interaction. In "O engano é a sorte dos contentes" (Deceit is the luck of the happy) a magician sets up his levitation act and what happens ends up creating another form that allows us to glimpse and reveal the enigmatic character of what surrounds us. In "Hard Water" - whose title is a reference to London water, which contains limestone - the actresses' clothes are attached to countless threads that come out of spools placed on hooks on the walls of the room or loose on the floor and, as they they move, the threads come loose and get tangled. From Tatiana's gaze and immersion in the spaces, fragments of an intimate language and a kaleidoscope of diverse affective cartographies emerge, which interpenetrate and mobilize something of the mystery of what is embedded in the tenuous balance of life.
In the video performance "Encrenca" (Trouble) – an action that takes place in Ålvik, Norway – two people, a Brazilian and a Norwegian, do not speak the same language. Like a game, each person speaks their original language slowly and then the other repeats it. Like puppets, they alternate the roles of commander and commander and, through their clothes, gestures and movements, reveal confusion with inexhaustible contradictions.
"Contratempo" (Setback) is a choreographed dance, a search for ways to escape in opposite directions, up and down escalators. It is the noise of the body – and of thought itself – that seeks its space of existence. It is, effectively, in the radical sense indicated by the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "an experience as crossing a danger in the relationship with another".
The series "Metade da fala no chão" (Half of speech on the ground) - the same as the permanent installation "Piano Surdo" (Deaf Piano), which is part of the Figueiredo Ferraz Institute Collection - features sculptures in which musical instruments are muted with wax, brass tubes, raw sheep's wool or cast bronze, present in the "Apito" (Whistle) and "Clarinete" (Clarinet) exhibition.
"Turnaround" (Reviravolta) is part of a set of works created with intertwined rubber and iron hoses, a study of the dispositions, deformations, twists and stretches that modify the material action and presence in the world.
In "Entrevista" (Interview) – a series of sculptures cast in iron – heads and equipment form a single body. In "Entrevista #3" (Interview #3), wired microphones plugged into the wall are stuck into a head. In "Entrevista #2" (Interview #2), the eye of the person filming's head joins the camera's viewfinder, and the mouth of the person being filmed connects to the lens.
The set of Tatiana Blass's works transcends the use of a single technique or language and creates a common atmosphere that, without being obvious, evokes great poetic strength in the intersection and juxtaposition of times and elements. Here, videos harbor pictorial strength and establish chromatic relationships, characters can unfold in silent scenes or in whispers present in paintings and sculptures.
Theater-inspired works equate blank paper with the stage. They are ghostly paintings, bearers of ambiguity in which everything mixes and decants: person, shadow, chair, the enigmatic revelation of things that are beneath the paint. A fine melancholy permeates the solitudes, making the territory of the formless and the undomesticable pulsate. This is the place that matters and where the artist, in vertigo, takes us. In the sculptures, the forms breathe, porous and allegorical, and seem to move towards other forms, unstable and pulsating like life.
The act of transfiguring representation, singularizing each work into its own multiplicity of languages, includes noises and sounds like a symphony that, in the end, reveals an almost silence. A buzz, like a poem by E. E. Cummings: "somewhere I've never been, blissfully beyond all experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most fragile gesture there are things that enclose me, or that I dare not touch because are too close."
Bianca Coutinho Dias
