The new solo show by Tatiana Blass, entitled A desprofissão also marks the launch of the first book that covers the entire trajectory of the artist Tatiana Blass, Editora Automatica. The first group gathers about twenty unseen paintings, in small dimensions, made in gouache on cotton and paper. The artist was inspired by scenes of classic plays, in which the actors, or characters, are absorbed by the surrounding space, which makes the figure and environment become one body pictorial. The intense, opaque colors of gouache paint, and the certain contoured shapes characteristic of Tatiana Blass’s painting, give an interesting ambiguity to the paintings.
Next to them, Tatiana exhibits videos of the Desprofissão series. There are three “video-paintings” in which the artist establishes a chromatic relationship between the elements. They are then exposed as paintings in ambiguous monitors, framed as if they were pictures. In all videos, a professional performs his activity but achieving an opposite result than expected. The car washer becomes a “sewer” when washing the car with dirty muddy water; the manicure becomes a “desmanicure”, which paints the entire hand of the client except his nails; and the paintbrush graffiti over the already existing graffiti, using a spray of the same color of the wall and thus “peeling it off.”
The artist also exhibits, and for the first time in Brazil, the video installation Bocejo, originally held for a solo project at this year’s ARCOMadrid fair. There are eleven videos synchronized in different audiovisual equipment, produced according to their formats and specific characteristics. Each of them displays a scene with people who yawn and then trigger yawns at the other characters. Then the screens “sleep” and go dark in stand-by mode, then “wake up” and replay the videos in a looping, creating a rather intriguing circle of yawns - and possibly a contaminant for the watcher.
In addition, Tatiana exposes previous video work little exhibited throughout her career. They are Cisma (2014), Encrenca_Trøbbel (2014), Electrical Room (2013) and Hard Water (2012). All are video performed by actors specifically for these works.