Not every presence implies a sound, a noise, a reason, a defined objective, or a final destination. Taken literally, such a statement may seem obvious—or even redundant. Amidst the contemporary chaos—a time marked by efficiency, cacophony, and a restlessness of many and varied kinds—it becomes easy to lose the ability to understand or reflect upon all the noise that surrounds us. Through an artistic production that spans multiple mediums and practices, artist Tatiana Blass (São Paulo, 1979) has, for over two decades, constructed a body of work that reveals itself as cohesive as it is—metaphorically—volatile. As powerful as it is fallible, as beautiful as it is fragile. Built and melted down. Invariably, however, exuberant in its imaginative richness.
Her fluid transition between media such as painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation is undoubtedly one of the indelible marks her work inscribes in the recent history of contemporary Brazilian art. Whether in institutional, commercial, or independent contexts—in the white cube or the routine of her studio—Blass builds the backbone of an oeuvre that is highly relevant not only because of its crossings between distinct fields of artistic expression but also because of her drive to challenge (contradict, interrupt) the original function of things. Things that exist in the world, that surround us, that are familiar to us.
Throughout her trajectory, the artist has allowed herself to be influenced by and to employ references from fields ranging from literature to music and beyond. Her current exhibition at Albuquerque Contemporânea—though never pointing in a precise, definitive direction, as is often the case with her work—signals her interest in theater and cinema, here presented through a set of new, previously unseen works.
In the Meia-luz painting series—whose title is inspired by the 1944 film Gaslight, directed by George Cukor—we are introduced to compositions that evoke the scenic plasticity of Pina Bausch's work, while also referencing the cinematic production of Swedish director Roy Andersson. The peculiar use of oil paint in these works manifests through a technique in which the pigment dilutes across the canvas surface in overlapping layers that ultimately fuse, making foreground and background members of a single composition.
Nearly indistinguishable instances. These are figures we observe—voilà!—in half-light, even though they are often painted in vibrant tones and saturated colors. Melancholy and life force walk hand in hand in Blass’s scenes. Figures that are half-human, half-abstract; beings disintegrating into pictorial matter, bodies that meet, float, move freely across the canvas like actors on a stage. The curtain falls; the fourth wall is broken.
In the Teatro de Arena – Tornado Subterrâneo series, Blass creates figurative compositions using materials such as wax on cast bronze surfaces—almost three-dimensional theaters that seek to amplify, in some way, the volume previously muted by the aforementioned paintings. These paintings also appear rendered on large-scale glass panels, highlighting the artist's skill in working across different and diverse pictorial surfaces. These last pieces are painted on the reverse side from which we observe them, creating cuts and intervals between the fields of color on the glass surface and making the world appear through traces, in a rigorous and, at the same time, sublime construction of color and form.
It is this muffled silence—the volume of sound compulsorily interrupted by Blass’s creative actions—that reaches its highest voltage in the installation Metade da fala no chão – Bateria Preta. In this work, we are confronted with the deconstructed fragments of a drum set, in its entirety. Blass, however, presses the "mute" button (so to speak), as microcrystalline wax spreads across the floor of the exhibition space as a shapeless matter that not only renders sound impossible but also constructs an overwhelming silence.
We are faced with works by an artist whose oeuvre is always revealed as a Frankensteinian organism—a creature in pieces, plots that lose their original function, ultimately. Silences that emerge after the excess of the world's noise has led us to desire witnessing a theater of silence itself. Nothing to be heard, much to be said. We are seeing sound and hearing images, at last.
