There is an image that seems particularly tense to me. A half-open door finds Matisse in his studio, sitting and looking down. The photograph, taken by Brassaï, does not allow one to see the object of his gaze. In the studio, ordered by a filtered light, dominates a large bunch of flowers that reinforces the serenity that the artist defended in his writings. Matisse thinks paintings from the inner gaze.

I am taking this gesture as a starting point because it is difficult not to think of Matisse when I come across many of Tatiana Blass’s works. Not in a formal sense, but in that which he termed “drawing with scissors”, and which supposed an aesthetic revolution for his time. After all, in Tatiana Blass’s works the cut and the outline are always present, whether as a fissure, mutilation, erasing, parenthesis, discordance, concordance, absence, distance, discontinuity, breath, occultation, emptiness, trick or collage. A cutting that is at the same time radical and smooth, veiled. As if it were a product of Photoshop . Like Matisse, instead of drawing shapes and/or outlines of shapes in order to fill them with colour, Tatiana draws and composes directly over that colour, taking advantages of the textures, which take on as much importance as the shapes.

In his text “A Sun broken in half”, Rodrigo Moura speaks of how his first impression about Tatiana Blass’s paintings was that of “facing a solar, timidly hedonistic poetics, yet supported on an idea of decorative pleasure or of voluptuous form, the matrix of which seemed to come from Matisse” . Although, for Matisse, this was all the product of a simplification: the textiles were as important as his odalisques and the outline was all of it. But his outline adds up – and I would like to believe that in Tatiana Blass’s works, more that the voluptuousness of the forms and decorative pleasure there is an omission of them – to a deconstruction of those forms that tell us of impossibility and catastrophe, of accident as a deviation from the norm and a sort of magic, trick and mystery that is rooted in what we cannot see, in the invisibility of the rest, to use Derrida’s terms. Thus, I intend to re-think that invis- ible emptiness that is hidden behind Matisse’s door and I imagine what Matisse’s face would have looked like if his painting had been divided into two halves, like in Tatiana Blass’s Zona morta [Dead Zone].

Tatiana Blass delves into the Babelish split through an overflowing of painting and sculpture and their possibilities in relation to architecture. In her mannerisms we detect a domination of space, a veritable exercising of prospective continuities and discontinuities and, therefore, a certain humour that is based on the absurdity of the impossibility. The physical presence in her works is remarkable, as well as the contrasts of textures and speeds that always hold the line – the cut and the outline – as an axis for conceptual discourse between disciplines. Her painting is developed from the tactile, setting in opposition not only textures but colours ca- pable of clashing with each other without becoming excessive and without removing delicateness and subtlety from a work that generates an ambiguous atmosphere capable of evoking and insinuating chromatic landscapes and temperatures.

Tatiana Blass manages to articulate different elements and materials in a composition capable of comfortably living within these tensions, “evoking dialogues between gravity and suspension, contention and dispersion” . Thus we should understand the density of her painting as a product of an effort “towards accommodating and calming diverse masses of colour in the best way possible, that is, intuitively finding a certain chromatic agreement that might structure the work” . Tiago Mesquita has written how in the reverse of this objectivity of forms – which neither hold signs of expressivity nor are a product of minimalist serialisation – Blass appears to ““seek a new form of building his intimacy”. And indeed does so through seeking the accident of the textures, the marks and the contrasts; that above-quoted tactile nature. Because nothing seems to match in Tatiana Blass’s painting, and yet the freshness and effectiveness of her paintings is obvious. Like someone working with a craft, Tatiana Blass is able to contain excess and propagate the pictorial experience beyond the object in question, simply by breaking the regular with a boldness that is so fresh that it seems inoffensive. However, the result is lethal: her works tell us of the beauty hiding in the strangeness of life, in the accident of experiment. Luiz Camillo Osorio stated, “the challenge for anyone writing about Tatiana Blass’s painting is to transmit the chromatic pulsing of her work. She achieves silence with colours that scream out. This is a strange, differentiated colour, although made up of common, even banal colours, sometimes touching on kitsch. To speak of colour there is to speak of a decorative boldness, of a bare will to take on a disconcerting beauty” .

Tatiana Blass’s painting takes place outside the painting itself. Even when it is carried out on the canvas, the characteristic neutral background disappears, seeking another type of tonal crossings between what is painted and what is decorated on her carpeted supports. On the other hand, when she creates the forms in other mediums, such as installation, her pictorial gaze remains in the shape of a landscape dominated by a curious horizon line (Pareo; Dead Zone...) which forces the spectator to generate his own forms, to complete that emptiness. The curious and paradoxical aspect is that works like Patas [Paws] or Pareo manage to fill it all in obliging us to look further. Like in a Rothko painting or in Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, it is, curiously, the emptiness that fills up everything . The spectator forms his own landscape, grants form to the rest.

In Tatiana Blass’s works we sense the invisible rest, from the German “rest”; that residue or mark that Derrida reminds us “is not” because it does not remain. Derrida emphasises that finiteness in stating that “the rest ‘is’ always that which might radically disappear” . Like in that white zone of Tatiana Blass’s red bulbs, or in that dead zone that allows an unfolding of reality and the stopping of time when it fragments the objects of a dwelling into two halves, the cut becomes the edge; more than being a non place, it would be a place outside the place, something like the heterotopias that Foucault defines, divided by the mirror: “I believe that between utopias and these absolutely other placings, these heterotopias, there would without doubt have been a sort of mixed, dividing experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is a utopia, because it is a place without a place. In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up virtually behind the surface, I am there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives me my own visibility back, that allows me to look at myself there where I am absent: the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopy, in the sense that the mirror really exists and has, on the place I occupy, a sort of rebound effect; from the mirror I find I am absent in the place I am in, as I see myself over there”. But this mirror, which we never see in Tatiana Blass’s works, would in this case be a zone of indiscernibility , like the one that Deleuze senses in Bacon’s paintings, where everything tends to flee, to go through the mirror of history. Like that mirror of Alice’s imagined by Lewis Carroll: “it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone”. That wonderful world could easily be that of the works of Tatiana Blass, such as Paws, Pareo or Dead Zone, a world in the continuous present, yet to be completed.

The ellipsis proposed by Tatiana Blass is spatial and temporal at the same time. Like all interference or dissemination, like all invisibility of the rest or coitus interruptus, ellipsis starts from the fragment. It is therefore an interruption of reality itself, of its time and of its space. But this break is not necessarily a rupture in its continuity. It would be more of an ellipsis, or that contemporary need for splitting, for transforming into a fragment. In his Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno stated: “the most demanding of the arts tends to go beyond form as a totality and reaches the fragmentary”. It seems that the event only took place in accidentality. Thus there is a certain fractal sense in Tatiana Blass’s paintings, capable of combining irregularity and structure. Awareness of disordered order remains precisely due to the strength of the fragment or the fissure in its anarchic potential, or anarchitectural potential if we are thinking of Gordon Matta-Clark and his obsession for reading new spatial apertures. These tensions generate a truly interesting, disturbing and pleasant aesthetic universe in Tatiana Blass.

We particularly see this in Dead Zone, an intervention carried out by Tatiana Blass in 2007 for an exhibition at the Centro Universitário Maria Antônia, where a small room is divided into two, with the upper half of the objects being suspended in a sort of enticing and surreal reality. If in Matta-Clark the light is filtered through his cuts, in Tatiana Blass an other floating part is generated, a dead zone. In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out how “the house lived in is not an inert box. The inhabited space transcends the geometric space”. And indeed, both Matta-Clark and Tatiana Blass force one to (re)-think the inhabitability of the contemporary space by transgressing it, making the gaze go beyond functionality, opening up new perspectives and calling attention to the hidden corners that are outside all logic. Tatiana Blass goes into the emptiness of things, into the poetry of everything that is excess, that overflows. We see this in previous works, such as her Cadeiras (Chairs). A central cut unbalances them and makes them useless. Previously, large stains of colour held them and parasitised them, like the lava from a volcano. Thus she destroyed the familiar through enormous areas of painting, which overflowed into everything, like in her paintings full of overlapping chromatic information. Everything consists of an ironic strategy of camouflage, like when in Espartilho [Corset] she tinges four platforms of varying heights and thicknesses with green paint, interfering in nature and at the same time disguising nature itself. Once again contention overcomes excess. And, once again, Tatiana Blass thinks painting outside painting.

The cuts that Tatiana Blass carries out are no more than deconstructions of the landscapes that are still left to us to inhabit. Therefore, like in her paintings, the emphasis on the line capable of moulding the composition remains in a work like Dead Zone, a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil that deals with the strangeness that emerges each time we try to set loose an old order. Tatiana Blass delves into the invisible, into the edge, something that also may have a lot to do with her choice of the material for her paintings, which also propose a parenthesis and/or fissure (albeit through accumulation) of what has already been built or manufactured.

Marguerite Yourcenar stated: “Our parents restored the statues; we took off their false noses and their false limbs; our descendents, in turn, will probably do something else. Our current point of view represents both greed and loss. The need to remake a complete statue, with false limbs, could partially be due to the naïve desire to possess and exhibit an object in a good state, inherent in all periods to the owners’ simple vanity (...) The great aficionados restored antiques out of pity. We undo their work out of pity. Perhaps we have also become more used to ruins and wounds (...) Finally, our sense of the pathetic takes pleasure in these mutila- tions; our predilection for abstract art makes us love these gaps, these fractures that neutralise, so to speak, the powerful element of those statues”.

Dead Zone is a disturbing work that is not without humour. Rodrigo Moura refers to Deviation to Red (1967-84) by Cildo Meireles . Also to some elements that provide clues towards Tatiana Blass’s deconstructive critical awareness in this little room, where references to Bruce Nauman or to Nuno Ramos, among others, make her discourse metalinguistic and autobiographical. The fiction, the painting within the painting, the windows onto the history of art, are particularly significant. But also a fissure between two ruinous images, the contrast in colours and a small detail: a still-life by Morandi. Against a background split into two tones and some objects, Morandi manages to create a space that has a lot to do with what Tatiana Blass’s work seeks out: the art of ellipsis. That is why among Morandi’s fans there were above all poets. Because his minimal drawings, something so simple and clear, refer us back to an atmosphere and a conviction: for Morandi the subject is painting. As in Tatiana Blass, it is not descriptive painting but a painting capable of reflecting on itself through creating spaces that hold a dialogue with their own limitations. This is the beautiful lesson of painting. To apprehend silence, like those poems that do not exist if they are not heard before their word, their silence. A world beyond words, where saying is impossible.

In this way me also understand her obsession for marking the landscapes in books and the books in bookcases that shelter them. Rio das Pedras, and Disfarce [Disguise] are two significant examples. The connection with everyday furniture is also evident in these proposals. In Rio das Pedras a four-hundred-page book repeating the same image over and over – the São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras quarry in the state of Minas Gerais – Blass draws out white lines intending to find the natural line drawn by the white sand on the stone. Once again, the line and its shiftings, like when in Cerco [Siege] (2007) the dissected pheasant breaks the regularity of the square of bars brass bars that Blass has previously set up. The movement is frozen again, the impossibility of reaching the horizon line for the pheasant generates an anguished gesture of capture and flight at the same time. Of desire and sacrifice. An intermediate spirit that aspires towards supporting itself on the thread of heaven and earth, on the zone of mere fatigue, as Heidegger might state.

Deep down, we may conclude that the fissure in Tatiana Blass is presented as a parenthesis and transparency, as a plausible insinuation of the being realized through an attentive gaze, as a place between things. Tatiana Blass places us before that which cannot be seen, but only imagined, like an unfinished drawing. Like in the film Exotica by Atom Egoyan, the key lies in going deeper into what is lacking. In Exotica, the light always comes before, or, rather, is located behind the characters, or even diagonally, but always avoiding shining head-on. The protagonist, or a large part of him, stays out of shot; sometimes in a very clear manner, like when the characters come out from behind the camera looking for the little girl or when the little girl covers the camera lens with her hand, stressing the obviousness of some other side. In Exotica there is a resistance of the image/ protagonist that remains untouchable and thus, as a result of this frustration, becomes pure desire, eroticism of the kind described by Bataille. The striptease music, which corresponds to Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet, reinforces that idea of impossibility. Tatiana Blass empties a part of the plane in order to saturate others, she grants a certain breath, like an ellipsis or like an eclipse, depending on the light. A frozen movement, a situation without action. On other occasions she saturates and combines, seeking a type of peaceful coexistence between colours and forms, a life in symbiosis, the product of drawing the horizon with scissors without stopping dreaming.

___________

1. Víctor del Río (“El efecto Photoshop”, Lápiz magazine no169/70, 2001) clearly describes how the pictorial character we are speaking of would not reside so much in the vocabulary of painting (canvases, palettes, brushes...) as in the very structure of the programme: “The painting is described in tradition through the exercise of fading and through the method of applying layers. The secret of the painting resided in a knowledge of superimposings and transparencies and their essence, in a way of “putting” matter on the canvas in a succes- sion of levels. Photoshop is based on a system of layers and channels through which it is possible to compose and decompose the image. Both devices allow it to be dealt with differently on its different levels. The layer structure allows one to ass elements outside the original photo when cutting out from the background others that are present in it, besides also allowing transparencies and fusions among the different levels. In turn, the system of channels allows the possibility of dealing separately with the different colour components that intervene according to the way one edits the image. The most important aspect might be that vocation for composition”.

2. Rodrigo Moura: “Un sol partido ao meio”, Galeria Carminha Macedo, Belo Horizonte, 2007

3. Idem, Moura.

4. Cauê Alves: “Tatiana Blass: sobre a dificultade ou da necessidade do inverno”, Paço das Artes, Sao Paulo, 2006

5. Tiago Mesquita: “Paisagem de papel”, Centro Cultural São Paulo, 2003

6. Luiz Camillo Osorio: “Por um belo desconcertante”, Galeria Virgílio, Sao Paulo, 2005

7. Friedrich wrote that “when a landscape is covered in mist it seems much more sublime, as it raises up and increases our imagiantion”. By removing depth and suppressing vanishing points in The Monk by the Sea, Friedrich expands space laterally and superficially, like in Oriental painting.

8. Cristina de Peretti and Paco Vidarte, Jacques Derrida (1930), Ediciones del Orto, 1998

9. Michel Foucault, Espacios diferentes in Obras esenciales Vol. III. Estética, ética y hermenéutica, Editorial Paidós, Barcelona, 1999

10. Michel Foucault - Des espaces autres, Conference given at the Cercle des études architecturals, 14th March 1967, published in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no 5, October 1984.

11. See Deleuze

12. Lewis Carroll: Alice ́s Adventures in Wonderland

13. Marguerite Yourcenar, El tiempo, gran escultor, Editorial Alfaguara, 1992

14. Idem, Moura.

15. Jose Ángel Valente pointed out that “a lot of poetry has felt the temptation of silence. Because by nature poetry tends to silence. Or contains it as natural material”, Antoni Tàpies / José Ángel Valente: Comunicación sobre el muro, Ediciones de la Rosa Cúbica, Barcelona, 1998, p. 55

16. We may conclude that there is another silence or emptiness in White Zone (lustre), from 2007, in which a set of red bulbs are interrupted in their vertical aspect by a white stripe. The mark here is erasure, rest.

17. “This looking up refers to up, to the sky, and yet remains below, on the ground. This looking up measures the between the sky and the earth. This between is assigned as a measurement in the inahabiting of man” (Heidegger, Conferences and Articles).na, 1994, pp.169-170).