Art is the intersection of people, images and objects in the world. At this intersection,  as art activates time and space, it makes it possible for the spectator to encounter personal and collective history, triggering a series of sensorial mechanisms. And it is at this very instant that art becomes revolutionary, when it touches emotions, memories and sensations. The person who sees is the one that feels and risks losing their certainties and becoming aware that they lack something. “When seeing is feeling that something unavoidably escapes us, that is to say: when seeing is losing. Everything is there. […] Things to be seen from afar and to be touched from anear, things that one wants or that one cannot caress. Obstacles, yet also things to exit from and to re-enter. In other words, volumes that bear voids.” [1]

The encounter with Tatiana Blass’s work takes us to a place of risk, where certainty escapes us. There is an ambivalent movement – of erasure and revelation, of construction and deconstruction, of gaps and continuities – that makes us doubt that which takes place before us. From a broader perspective regarding the artist’s more recent work, one gets the impression that it ventures to deal with a recurring reading of and a constant reflection on time, creating materiality for a hidden element, which is present in both her paintings and her three-dimensional pieces.

Tatiana Blass’s production is characterized by the continual practice of painting and experimentation with the material: from the use of different paints (gouache, acrylic, oil, synthetic enamel) – on media as varied as canvas, paper, and glass – to the dilation of painting in a three-dimensional space using a range of material that includes wax, tin, ceramic, and found objects, among others. Therefore, it is a vast material world this one we are approaching. Whether the work is a sculpture, an object, an installation, or a video, it is always marked by the pictorial issue – which brings forward questions regarding volume, framing, and fitting –, and by the presence of the line within the composition.

The paintings in the series Os sentados [The Seated], initiated in 2019, and Os de pé [Those Standing], initiated in 2022, seem to draw the eye into the built space, which resembles the front of a stage or a circus ring, in which human figures appear disposed in relation to other elements, such as tables and chairs. These works take off from images gathered from photographs or theatrical plays that serve as a first reference for the composition. The paintings are made through the superimposition of layers of impure colors with hues ranging primarily from greyish green to blue, and from reddish brown to yellow. Just as with previous paintings, such as the series entitled Entrevista [Interview] (2013) and De costas / Teatro [From the Back / Theater] (2014), the works are made with not-too-thick, highly diluted paint that leaves behind vestiges and lends an enigmatic air to the painting.

The point of view in these paintings is unique, as the event is portrayed at a specific instant, providing them with temporal unity, as in photography. The time is the present, yet these images contain a sort of memory evoked through the presence of fields of color superimposed over the figures. These color fields guide the material construction of the work in the sense that they intuitively achieve a certain chromatic balance for the composition. They are not simply spaces or gaps, but rather attempts to fill a hole that suggests a certain emotion in the painting. At times heads and torsos simply become circular and oval forms and a chair is discerned by a single vertical line that represents its leg. These elliptical forms appear in other older works by the artist, notably her collages. Another feature of these images are the horizontal and vertical lines they display – crevices, cracks, fissures –, “organic lines” like apertures of light that reveal continuities and ruptures among fields of color. In this sense the organic line is characterized, as it is in Lygia Clark, as “the prepositional space between; it is the emptiness that articulates the planar discourse of color; it is the place of the air we breathe that integrates and articulates the concrete areas of the painting.” [2]

The first time the artist experimented with taking painting into the three-dimensional space was in 2004, with Atavio [Embellishment], an installation presented at Espaço 397, in São Paulo. At the occasion, Tatiana Blass covered part of the gray cement floor with pink and blue Paviflex, forming fields of color with rounded edges that gave it an appearance of softness and the impression that a huge volume of paint had been spilt there. An illusion. In some parts of the colored floor there were empty semi-circles, holes, as if the paint had been held back by something rigid. Just as in Os sentados [The Seated], rounded geometrical forms alternate in the work with figurative elements – plant pots, doors, steps, elements of the space itself, –, creating estrangement. In other collages and paintings from the same period, blocks of color are roughly overlaid, but a type of void or interval is always left on the plane of the painting. These gaps are, at times, the very background of the piece, or distances between geometrical forms, suggesting mountainous landscapes or clouds moving across the sky. While in the group of sculptures Cauda [Tail], from 2005, these masses of color coat objects on the floor of the exhibition space. Solid and bright colors cover part of the object, giving the impression of a viscous liquid running over a spherical shape. These masses of color seem soft, but on closer inspection we see they are rigid and solid – yet another well-humored illusion created by the artist.

The idea of something that inundates, runs or overflows is repeated in many other works. In Pintura que derrete [Painting that Melts], from 2022, the image created in paint and wax on metal comes gradually undone through the simple mechanism of a heat conductor. When plugged into the power outlet on the gallery wall, the sheet of metal that forms the base of the painting heats up, slowly dissolving the painting. The colors run and create a misshapen image that is new both to the public and the artist herself.

In the sculpture Os sentados [The Seated] (2022), produced for the space at Galeria Millan, a human figure in wax is seated and, in its interior, is a wooden chair. Above it, hangs a pendant with a heat source that is activated whenever someone enters the space. This heat makes the wax melt little by little, undoing part of the figure and revealing the chair. As is the case in previous works such as Vitrine_(boneco sem descanso) [Window Display (doll without rest)], from 2018, and Coluna (Agachado) [Spine (Crouched)], from 2013 –, this piece becomes deformed and portions of its material are left strewn across the floor. Likewise, this procedural approach is employed in Cera-cerâmica [Wax-ceramic], from 2020, a work recorded on video in which two heads, one in wax and the other in ceramic, move themselves due to the heat produced by the lit burner of a stove. Here one must distinguish between the violence represented (the sensational, the spectacular) and the violence of the sensation, since Tatiana Blass’s work is far from being tragically or cruelly staged. Thus, it is necessary to think more about the violence of the variability of intensive and differential states of materiality rather than about a supposed cruelty inflicted on an object. By setting in motion the undoing of form, be it a human figure or the space of the framed canvas in painting, Blass brings circularity to the intensities of living materiality, in other words, fluxes, forces, emotions and sensations, in a dual movement of containment and overflowing. “Tatiana Blass penetrates the void in things, the poetry of all that exceeds, that overflows.” [3]

There are two movements at play: liquefaction and overflowing. What remains at the end of these works that deal with a materiality which is not contained is a scene of fragmentation and a certain disorder, a sort of physicality of the painting. In a text from 2011 about the exhibition Fim de partida [Endgame], the critic Paulo Venâncio Filho says: “Tatiana provokes a type of sculptural inversion: a regression of the sculptural to the material, a remission to an amorphous state. The sculptures, which are actors and characters, begin to dissolve under the heat of the lamps and the beginning becomes the end. From wax to wax, from dust to dust.” [4] The material, whether paint, wax, clay or water, is changing, moving, because it is uncontained.

In two previous works – Penélope, from 2011, and Mais dia, menos noite [More Day, Less Night], from 2019 –, the overflowing mechanism is set in motion on an architectural scale by, in a way, invading the space with color. In these works, two historical buildings, the Morumbi Chapel in São Paulo and the Pampulha Museum in Belo Horizonte, are engulfed in a red mass made of wool yarn, immersing the viewer in this soft material and producing a reversal of the space. At the center of the installation is a loom with an unfinished rug coming out from one of its extremities. At the other end, the threads, getting into the loom in order to be woven, hang out from it and spread around across the floor, up the walls and façades and take over the landscape that surrounds the building where the red thread blends into the vegetation, altering the landscape and creating continuity between inside and out.

The recent collection of works the artist has entitled O fim continua [The end goes on] (2022) also deals with the ideas of containment and overflowing, besides those of continuity and rupture. Reproductions of garden hoses, which would typically be flexible objects made of rubber, are made here from metal, connecting one of its ends to the other, which gives rise to a feeling of estrangement. Not by chance, the sculptures are made of iron, a very common element in the surroundings of Belo Horizonte, where the artist has been living for some years. Due to the metal’s presence in the region, the soil is reddish and, as a consequence of the intense local mining, the dry dust circulates and makes the entire landscape reddish brown – an indelible mark on those who live in the region.

As they double back on themselves, these iron hoses form long Möbius strips in multiple loops, eliminating the space between outside and inside. As is the case in so many of Tatiana Blass’s works, everyday objects are taken away from their primary function, resulting in a dislocation of meanings, exemplified in the series of works Metade da fala no chão [Half of the Speech on the Floor] (2008-18). In this series, musical instruments undergo a process of being muted, either for having its bells obstructed (by spilling wax on them and preventing the production of sounds) or for having its original shape subverted in extension.

The interruption of something supposed to happen, or the erasure of an element in the landscape, this sort of “presence in the absence” is a feature common to the aforementioned works and was already present in Páreo [Race]. This piece from 2006 is a sculpture that consists of four life-size horse hooves that descend a stairway. The rest of this horse in movement is merely suggested, recreated mentally by the viewer. In the place of the body is the surrounding landscape, as if the animal’s body had been erased or interrupted by the landscape. The horse makes itself present as a result of its very absence, as it is up to the viewer to imagine it in the space and build the image as a whole. Such an approach to presence is noted in later works such as Zona Morta [Dead Zone], from 2007, and Calçado [Fitted] from 2018.

In Reviravolta [Twist] (2022), there is also an iron hose, but here it is inside the house (Galeria Millan), spilling water onto the floor, which then runs down to the floor below, flowing through the architecture and staining the space in a trail of rust. On this lower floor, the drops fall onto a sculpture whose head, made of raw clay, is slowly disfigured and deformed by the action of the water. The water consumes the clay in an autophagic circuit. The work changes throughout the exhibition and, as is often the case in Tatiana Blass’s works, the visitor-viewer only witnesses part of this process of transformation, the entirety of the image is never seen. In this sense, the artist is operating on time itself in order to say something about that which escapes us and subverts the architectural space as shared between the self and the other, in search of alternative logical relationships within dynamic and singular events.

            In “Thirst”, a short poem by the artist, she writes:

the difference
between the lake
and the hole that the rain fills with water
is how much the soil
cedes to the water

The word “thirst” [“sede”, in Portuguese] implies discomfort, dissatisfaction, need, but also desire and will.  The lake and the hole end up being the same thing, even if they are drawn together, in the poem, through difference. It is an intelligent way of approaching the nature of things: the lake was once a hole and may return to being so. The poem is also an admirable way of speaking of the infinite void that inhabits the subject and which drives desire, as “all art is characterized by a certain form of organization around this void.” [5] It is a way to be present by the absence.

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1. Didi-Huberman, Georges. O que vemos, o que nos olha. From the translation to Portuguese by Paulo Neves. São Paulo: 34, 1998, p. 34.
2. Bois, Yves-Alain; Herkenhoff, Paulo. Lygia Clark (1920-1988): 100 anos. Translation Kika Serra. (exhibition catalogue). Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 2021, p. 85.
3. De Freitas, Douglas. “O labor de Penélope” (exhibition folder). São Paulo: Capela do Morumbi, September 2011.
4. Venâncio Filho, Paulo. “Fim de partida” (exhibition folder). Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, January 2011.
5. Lacan, Jacques. (1959-60). Le Séminaire, livre VII: L’Éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1986, p. 155.