A fold synthesizes the subtlety of title of this exhibition which condenses a period of more than 15 years of Tatiana Blass’ production. Comprising around 40 works, this exhibition encompasses distinct moments in a multi-faceted trajectory that transits between diverse mediums — painting, video, sculpture, and installation — and which has never ceased to embrace ambiguity and beauty.

“Base balance” is a title which, in an gesture of poetic reduction, reveals the special ethic in the broad-ranging trajectory of an artist who, in blending and juxtaposing various references — theater, cinema, literature and music — shifts brilliantly, via vibration and contagion, through borderland regions and languages. This exhibition unravels the very instability of a production that maps out the vestiges of intimate spaces and thoughts, of relationships with things in a state of latency. Here, instability refers to the deepest rigor that can be applied to the line, the erasure, the brushstroke, to each gesture to be found in the oscillation between solid and malleable, between heteroclite materials and languages.

This acute point of invention can be glimpsed in the “Bagunça” series: works that originated in playing with her children, who began the paintings that Tatiana subsequently continued, bypassing the scene. In bringing artistic practice closer to childsplay, something as enigmatic as it was catalytic came into view of a relationship with a form of knowledge that was still in a non-domesticated state.

In a series of works that take as their central reference the oeuvre of playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose plays — which lean strongly on psychology and whose characters contain many doubts and ambiguities — came to her attention during an artistic residency in the fjords of Norway, Tatiana creates spaces based on scenes from plays. In a way, the magnetic landscape of the deep and narrow valley together with the housing and architecture of the place, impregnated her paintings. The planes became diluted into a single pictorial body, blurring boundaries between the background, human figures, chairs, tables and other objects that compose the scenes, without making precise distinctions between form and color. Tatiana dilutes and reconfigures experiences of temporality and contemplation, revealing the world through fragments of the real.

In another series of paintings made on glass there is an inversion of the traditional oil painting technique. Produced on the reverse of the surface, the first layer of enamel applied is always immediately visible, resisting the superimposition of subsequent layers. The artist creates cuts and intervals between fields of color on the surface of the glass, allowing the world to appear by means of vestiges, in a construction in color and form which is at once rigorous and at the same time, sublime.

Her works on paper or cotton canvas — in which gouache enters into the fiber of the textile — contain a singular chromatic question. Tatiana uses gouache which, characteristically, is opaque and intense in color, and takes on the chromatic exercise in a unique manner, favoring colors that make for uneasy partnerships, such as orange with pink, lemon yellow with brown, and other combinations that result in an entirely singular interplay.

In “O resto que fica”, a series produced in the context of an artistic residency in London, Tatiana intervenes in photographs of bicycles abandoned on the London underground, using white oil paint. Much like Alberto Giacometti — who was amazed by, and marveled at the minimal, radical and singular differences of every scene, and who himself said “everything surpasses me” — the artist does not close her eyes to everyday revelations, and lets us see that what we call reality is a construction that is never entirely finished, and it is up to the artistic gesture to provide some contour and possibility of fruition.

In the selection of videos, four pairs of characters develop a type of dialogue or interaction. In “O engano é a sorte dos contentes” a magician sets up his levitation trick and what actually takes place ends up creating another form which allows us to glimpse and reveal the enigmatic nature of what surrounds us. Meanwhile, in “Hard Water” — whose title is a reference to the water in London which is high in calcium — the clothes of the actors are trapped by countless threads that come from bobbins attached to hooks on the room’s walls, or lie loose on the floor and, as the actors move, these threads come loose and become entangled. From Tatiana’s gaze and immersion in the space arise fragments of an intimate tongue and a kaleidoscope of diverse emotional cartographies that interweave and mobilize some of the mystery of that which is embedded in the tenuous balance of life.

In the video-performance “Encrenca” — an action which takes place in Ålvik, Norway — two people, a Brazilian and a Norwegian, do not speak the same tongue. As in a game, each one enunciates slowly in their native language so that the other can then repeat it. Marionette-like, they swap roles of leader and follower and, through their clothes, gestures, and movements, reveal confusion in inexhaustible contradictions.

“Contratempo” is a choreographed dance, a search for escape routes in opposite directions, in the ups and downs of escalators. This is the body’s noise — and the noise of one’s own thoughts — seeking out space for existence. In the radical sense suggested by the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this is effectively “an experience akin to the crossing over from one danger in relation to another”.

The series “Metade da fala no chão” — which also includes the permanent installation “Piano Surdo”, which belongs to the collection of the Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz — features sculptures in which musical instruments are muted by wax, tin pipes, pure sheep’s wool or cast bronze, represented in the exhibition by “Apito” and “Clarinete”.

“Reviravolta” is part of a collection of works created with interwoven hoses of rubber and iron, a study of the disposition, deformation, kinks and stretching that modify the action and material presence in the world.

In “Entrevista” — a series of sculptures cast in iron — heads and pieces of equipment form a single body. In “Entrevista #3”, microphones with cables plugged into the wall are stuck into a head. While in “Entrevista #2” the eye of the head of the person who is filming is joined to the visor of the camera, and the mouth of the subject being filmed merges into the lens.

Tatiana Blass’ production transcends the use of a single technique or language and creates a common atmosphere, which, without being obvious, evokes great poetic force at the intersection and juxtaposition of different times and elements. Here, videos contain pictorial strength and establish chromatic relationships, characters may unfold in silent scenes or in the whispers present in the paintings and the sculptures.

The works that draw inspiration from theater equate blank paper with the stage. These are phantasmagorical paintings, vessels of ambiguity in which everything blends and settles: person, shadow, chair, the enigmatic revelation of the things that lie below the paint. A fine melancholy permeates these solitudes, making this territory of the formless and the untameable pulsate. This is the place that interests the artist and this is where she dizzyingly leads us. In the sculptures, forms breathe, porous and allegorical, and seem to move themselves towards other forms, unstable and pulsating, like life itself.

The act of transfiguring representation, singularizing each work in a unique multiplicity of languages, includes noises and sounds like a symphony which, in the end, reveals an almost silence. A murmur, like a poem by E. E. Cummings: “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near”.